The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud

vii. The Psychology of the Dream Processes

AMONG the dreams which have been communicated to me by others, there is one which is at this point
especially worthy of our attention. It was told me by a female patient who had heard it related in a lecture on dreams.
Its original source is unknown to me. This dream evidently made a deep impression upon the lady, since she went so far
as to imitate it, i.e., to repeat the elements of this dream in a dream of her own; in order, by this transference, to
express her agreement with a certain point in the dream.

The preliminary conditions of this typical dream were as follows: A father had been watching day and night beside
the sick-bed of his child. After the child died, he retired to rest in an adjoining room, but left the door ajar so
that he could look from his room into the next, where the child's body lay surrounded by tall candles. An old man, who
had been installed as a watcher, sat beside the body, murmuring prayers. After sleeping for a few hours the father
dreamed that the child was standing by his bed, clasping his arm and crying reproachfully: "Father, don't you see that
I am burning?" The father woke up and noticed a bright light coming from the adjoining room. Rushing in, he found that
the old man had fallen asleep, and the sheets and one arm of the beloved body were burnt by a fallen candle.

The meaning of this affecting dream is simple enough, and the explanation given by the lecturer, as my patient
reported it, was correct. The bright light shining through the open door on to the sleeper's eyes gave him the
impression which he would have received had he been awake: namely, that a fire had been started near the corpse by a
falling candle. It is quite possible that he had taken into his sleep his anxiety lest the aged watcher should not be
equal to his task.

We can find nothing to change in this interpretation; we can only add that the content of the dream must be
overdetermined, and that the speech of the child must have consisted of phrases which it had uttered while still alive,
and which were associated with important events for the father. Perhaps the complaint, "I am burning," was associated
with the fever from which the child died, and "Father, don't you see?" to some other affective occurrence unknown to
us.

Now, when we have come to recognize that the dream has meaning, and can be fitted into the context of psychic
events, it may be surprising that a dream should have occurred in circumstances which called for such an immediate
waking. We shall then note that even this dream is not lacking in a wish-fulfilment. The dead child behaves as though
alive; he warns his father himself; he comes to his father's bed and clasps his arm, as he probably did in the
recollection from which the dream obtained the first part of the child's speech. It was for the sake of this wish-
fulfilment that the father slept a moment longer. The dream was given precedence over waking reflection because it was
able to show the child still living. If the father had waked first, and had then drawn the conclusion which led him
into the adjoining room, he would have shortened the child's life by this one moment.

There can be no doubt about the peculiar features in this brief dream which engage our particular interest. So far,
we have endeavoured mainly to ascertain wherein the secret meaning of the dream consists, how it is to be discovered,
and what means the dream-work uses to conceal it. In other words, our greatest interest has hitherto been centered on
the problems of interpretation. Now, however, we encounter a dream which is easily explained, and the meaning of which
is without disguise; we note that nevertheless this dream preserves the essential characteristics which conspicuously
differentiate a dream from our waking thoughts, and this difference demands an explanation. It is only when we have
disposed of all the problems of interpretation that we feel how incomplete is our psychology of dreams.

But before we turn our attention to this new path of investigation, let us stop and look back, and consider whether
we have not overlooked something important on our way hither. For we must understand that the easy and comfortable part
of our journey lies behind us. Hitherto, all the paths that we have followed have led, if I mistake not, to light, to
explanation, and to full understanding; but from the moment when we seek to penetrate more deeply into the psychic
processes in dreaming, all paths lead into darkness. It is quite impossible to explain the dream as a psychic process,
for to explain means to trace back to the known, and as yet we have no psychological knowledge to which we can refer
such explanatory fundamentals as may be inferred from the psychological investigation of dreams. On the contrary, we
shall be compelled to advance a number of new assumptions, which do little more than conjecture the structure of the
psychic apparatus and the play of the energies active in it; and we shall have to be careful not to go too far beyond
the simplest logical construction, since otherwise its value will be doubtful. And even if we should be unerring in our
inferences, and take cognizance of all the logical possibilities, we should still be in danger of arriving at a
completely mistaken result, owing to the probable incompleteness of the preliminary statement of our elementary data.
We shall not he able to arrive at any conclusions as to the structure and function of the psychic instrument from even
the most careful investigation of dreams, or of any other isolated activity; or, at all events, we shall not be able to
confirm our conclusions. To do this we shall have to collate such phenomena as the comparative study of a whole series
of psychic activities proves to be reliably constant. So that the psychological assumptions which we base on the
analysis of the dream-processes will have to mark time, as it were, until they can join up with the results of other
investigations which, proceeding from another starting-point, will seek to penetrate to the heart of the same
problem.

A. The Forgetting of Dreams

I propose, then, that we shall first of all turn our attention to a subject which brings us to a hitherto
disregarded objection, which threatens to undermine the very foundation of our efforts at dream-interpretation. The
objection has been made from more than one quarter that the dream which we wish to interpret is really unknown to us,
or, to be more precise, that we have no guarantee that we know it as it really occurred.

What we recollect of the dream, and what we subject to our methods of interpretation, is, in the first place,
mutilated by the unfaithfulness of our memory, which seems quite peculiarly incapable of retaining dreams, and which
may have omitted precisely the most significant parts of their content. For when we try to consider our dreams
attentively, we often have reason to complain that we have dreamed much than we remember; that unfortunately we know
nothing more than this one fragment, and that our recollection of even this fragment seems to us strangely uncertain.
Moreover, everything goes to prove that our memory reproduces the dream not only incompletely but also untruthfully, in
a falsifying manner. As, on the one hand, we may doubt whether what we dreamed was really as disconnected as it is in
our recollections, so on the other hand we may doubt whether a dream was really as coherent as our account of it;
whether in our attempted reproduction we have not filled in the gaps which really existed, or those which are due to
forgetfulness, with new and arbitrarily chosen material; whether we have not embellished the dream, rounded it off and
corrected it, so that any conclusion as to its real content becomes impossible. Indeed, one writer (Spitta)
1 surmises that all that is orderly and coherent is really first put into the dream during the attempt to
recall it. Thus we are in danger of being deprived of the very object whose value we have undertaken to determine.

1 Similar views are expressed by Foucault and Tannery.

In all our dream-interpretations we have hitherto ignored these warnings. On the contrary, indeed, we have found
that the smallest, most insignificant, and most uncertain components of the dream-content invited interpretations no
less emphatically than those which were distinctly and certainly contained in the dream. In the dream of Irma's
injection we read: "I quickly called in Dr. M," and we assumed that even this small addendum would not have got into
the dream if it had not been susceptible of a special derivation. In this way we arrived at the history of that
unfortunate patient to whose bedside I quickly called my older colleague. In the seemingly absurd dream which treated
the difference between fifty-one and fifty-six as a quantity negligible the number fifty-one was mentioned repeatedly.
Instead of regarding this as a matter of course, or a detail of indifferent value, we proceeded from this to a second
train of thought in the latent dream-content, which led to the number fifty-one, and by following up this clue we
arrived at the fears which proposed fifty-one years as the term of life in the sharpest opposition to a dominant train
of thought which was boastfully lavish of the years. In the dream Non vixit I found, as an insignificant interpolation,
that I had at first overlooked the sentence: As P does not understand him, Fl asks me, etc. The interpretation then
coming to a standstill, I went back to these words, and I found through them the way to the infantile phantasy which
appeared in the dream-thoughts as an intermediate point of junction. This came about by means of the poet's verses:

Selten habt ihr mich verstanden,

Selten auch verstand ich Euch,

Nur wenn wir im Kot uns fanden

So verstanden wir uns gleich! 1

1 Seldom have you understood me,

Seldom have I understood you,

But when we found ourselves in the mire,

We at once understood each other!

Every analysis will afford evidence of the fact that the most insignificant features of the dream are indispensable
to interpretation, and will show how the completion of the task is delayed if we postpone our examination of them. We
have given equal attention, in the interpretation of dreams, to every nuance of verbal expression found in them;
indeed, whenever we are confronted by a senseless or insufficient wording, as though we had failed to translate the
dream into the proper version, we have respected even these defects of expression. In brief, what other writers have
regarded as arbitrary improvisations, concocted hastily to avoid confusion, we have treated like a sacred text. This
contradiction calls for explanation.

It would appear, without doing any injustice to the writers in question, that the explanation is in our favour. From
the standpoint of our newly-acquired insight into the origin of dreams, all contradictions are completely reconciled.
It is true that we distort the dream in our attempt to reproduce it; we once more find therein what we have called the
secondary and often misunderstanding elaboration of the dream by the agency of normal thinking. But this distortion is
itself no more than a part of the elaboration to which the dream-thoughts are constantly subjected as a result of the
dream-censorship. Other writers have here suspected or observed that part of the dream-distortion whose work is
manifest; but for us this is of little consequence, as we know that a far more extensive work of distortion, not so
easily apprehended, has already taken the dream for its object from among the hidden dream-thoughts. The only mistake
of these writers consists in believing the modification effected in the dream by its recollection and verbal expression
to be arbitrary, incapable of further solution, and consequently liable to lead us astray in our cognition of the
dream. They underestimate the determination of the dream in the psyche. Here there is nothing arbitrary. It can be
shown that in all cases a second train of thought immediately takes over the determination of the elements which have
been left undetermined by the first. For example, I wish quite arbitrarily to think of a number; but this is not
possible; the number that occurs to me is definitely and necessarily determined by thoughts within me which may be
quite foreign to my momentary purpose. 1 The modifications which the dream undergoes in its revision by the
waking mind are just as little arbitrary. They preserve an associative connection with the content, whose place they
take, and serve to show us the way to this content, which may itself be a substitute for yet another content.

1 Cf. The Psycho-pathology of Everday Life.

In analysing the dreams of patients I impose the following test of this assertion, and never without success. If the
first report of a dream seems not very comprehensible, I request the dreamer to repeat it. This he rarely does in the
same words. But the passages in which the expression is modified are thereby made known to me as the weak points of the
dream's disguise; they are what the embroidered emblem on Siegfried's raiment was to Hagen. These are the points from
which the analysis may start. The narrator has been admonished by my announcement that I intend to take special pains
to solve the dream, and immediately, obedient to the urge of resistance, he protects the weak points of the dream's
disguise, replacing a treacherous expression by a less relevant one. He thus calls my attention to the expressions
which he has discarded. From the efforts made to guard against the solution of the dream, I can also draw conclusions
about the care with which the raiment of the dream has been woven.

The writers whom I have mentioned are, however, less justified when they attribute so much importance to the doubt
with which our judgment approaches the relation of the dream. For this doubt is not intellectually warranted; our
memory can give no guarantees, but nevertheless we are compelled to credit its statements far more frequently than is
objectively justifiable. Doubt concerning the accurate reproduction of the dream, or of individual data of the dream,
is only another offshoot of the dream-censorship, that is, of resistance to the emergence of the dream-thoughts into
consciousness. This resistance has not yet exhausted itself by the displacements and substitutions which it has
effected, so that it still clings, in the form of doubt, to what has been allowed to emerge. We can recognize this
doubt all the more readily in that it is careful never to attack the intensive elements of the dream, but only the weak
and indistinct ones. But we already know that a transvaluation of all the psychic values has taken place between the
dream-thoughts and the dream. The distortion has been made possible only by devaluation; it constantly manifests itself
in this way and sometimes contents itself therewith. If doubt is added to the indistinctness of an element of the
dream-content, we may, following this indication, recognize in this element a direct offshoot of one of the outlawed
dream-thoughts. The state of affairs is like that obtaining after a great revolution in one of the republics of
antiquity or the Renaissance. The once powerful, ruling families of the nobility are now banished; all high posts are
filled by upstarts; in the city itself only the poorer and most powerless citizens, or the remoter followers of the
vanquished party, are tolerated. Even the latter do not enjoy the full rights of citizenship. They are watched with
suspicion. In our case, instead of suspicion we have doubt. I must insist, therefore, that in the analysis of a dream
one must emancipate oneself from the whole scale of standards of reliability; and if there is the slightest possibility
that this or that may have occurred in the dream, it should be treated as an absolute certainty. Until one has decided
to reject all respect for appearances in tracing the dream-elements, the analysis will remain at a standstill.
Disregard of the element concerned has the psychic effect, in the person analysed, that nothing in connection with the
unwished ideas behind this element will occur to him. This effect is really not self-evident; it would be quite
reasonable to say, "Whether this or that was contained in the dream I do not know for certain; but the following ideas
happen to occur to me." But no one ever does say so; it is precisely the disturbing effect of doubt in the analysis
that permits it to be unmasked as an offshoot and instrument of the psychic resistance. Psycho — analysis is
justifiably suspicions. One of its rules runs: Whatever disturbs the progress of the work is a resistance.
1

1 This peremptory statement: "Whatever disturbs the progress of the work is a resistance"
might easily be misunderstood. It has, of course, the significance merely of a technical rule, a warning for the
analyst. It is not denied that during an analysis events may occur which cannot be ascribed to the intention of the
person analysed. The patient's father may die in other ways than by being murdered by the patient, or a war may break
out and interrupt the analysis. But despite the obvious exaggeration of the above statement there is still something
new and useful in it. Even if the disturbing event is real and independent of the patient, the extent of the disturbing
influence does often depend only on him, and the resistance reveals itself unmistakably in the ready and immoderate
exploitation of such an opportunity.

The forgetting of dreams, too, remains inexplicible until we seek to explain it by the power of the psychic
censorship. The feeling that one has dreamed a great deal during the night and has retained only a little of it may
have yet another meaning in a number of cases: it may perhaps mean that the dream-work has continued in a perceptible
manner throughout the night, but has left behind it only one brief dream. There is, however, no possible doubt that a
dream is progressively forgotten on waking. One often forgets it in spite of a painful effort to recover it. I believe,
however, that just as one generally overestimates the extent of this forgetting, so also one overestimates the lacunae
in our knowledge of the dream due to the gaps occurring in it. All the dream-content that has been lost by forgetting
can often be recovered by analysis; in a number of cases, at all events, it is possible to discover from a single
remaining fragment, not the dream, of course — which, after all, is of no importance — but the whole of the
dream-thoughts. It requires a greater expenditure of attention and self-suppression in the analysis; that is all; but
it shows that the forgetting of the dream is not innocent of hostile intention. 1

1 As an example of the significance of doubt and uncertainty in a dream with a simultaneous
shrinking of the dream-content to a single element, see my General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis the dream of the
sceptical lady patient, p. 492 below, the analysis of which was successful, despite a short postponement.

A convincing proof of the tendencious nature of dream-forgetting — of the fact that it serves the resistance — is
obtained on analysis by investigating a preliminary stage of forgetting. 1 It often happens that, in the
midst of an interpretation, an omitted fragment of the dream suddenly emerges which is described as having been
previously forgotten. This part of the dream that has been wrested from forgetfulness is always the most important
part. It lies on the shortest path to the solution of the dream, and for that every reason it was most exposed to the
resistance. Among the examples of dreams that I have included in the text of this treatise, it once happened that I had
subsequently to interpolate a fragment of dream-content. The dream is a dream of travel, which revenges itself on two
unamiable traveling companions; I have left it almost entirely uninterpreted, as part of its content is obscene. The
part omitted reads: "I said, referring to a book of Schiller's: 'It is from . . . ' but corrected myself, as
I realized my mistake: 'It is by . . . ' Whereupon the man remarked to his sister, 'Yes, he said it
correctly.'" 2

1 Concerning the intention of forgetting in general, see my The Psycho-pathology of Everyday
Life.

2 Such corrections in the use of foreign languages are not rare in dreams, but they are
usually attributed to foreigners. Maury (p. 143), while he was studying English, once dreamed that he informed someone
that he had called on him the day before in the following words: "I called for you yesterday." The other answered
correctly: "You mean: I called on you yesterday."

Self-correction in dreams, which to some writers seems so wonderful, does not really call for consideration. But I
will draw from my own memory an instance typical of verbal errors in dreams. I was nineteen years of age when I visited
England for the first time, and I spent a day on the shore of the Irish Sea. Naturally enough, I amused myself by
picking up the marine animals left on the beach by the tide, and I was just examining a starfish (the dream begins with
Hollthurn — Holothurian) when a pretty little girl came up to me and asked me: "Is it a starfish? Is it alive?" I
replied, "Yes, he is alive," but then felt ashamed of my mistake, and repeated the sentence correctly. For the
grammatical mistake which I then made, the dream substitutes another which is quite common among German people. "Das
Buch ist von Schiller" is not to be translated by "the book is from," but by "the book is by." That the dream-work
accomplishes this substitution, because the word from, owing to its consonance with the German adjective fromm (pious,
devout) makes a remarkable condensation possible, should no longer surprise us after all that we have heard of the
intentions of the dream-work and its unscrupulous selection of means. But what relation has this harmless recollection
of the seashore to my dream? It explains, by means of a very innocent example, that I have used the word — the word
denoting gender, or sex or the sexual (he) — in the wrong place. This is surely one of the keys to the solution of the
dream. Those who have heard of the derivation of the book-title Matter and Motion (Moliere in Le Malade Imaginaire: La
Matiere est-elle laudable? — A Motion of the bowels) will readily be able to supply the missing parts.

Moreover, I can prove conclusively, by a demonstratio ad oculos, that the forgetting of the dream is in a large
measure the work of the resistance. A patient tells me that he has dreamed, but that the dream has vanished without
leaving a trace, as if nothing had happened. We set to work, however; I come upon a resistance which I explain to the
patient; encouraging and urging him, I help him to become reconciled to some disagreeable thought; and I have hardly
succeeded in doing so when he exclaims: "Now I can recall what I dreamed!" The same resistance which that day disturbed
him in the work of interpretation caused him also to forget the dream. By overcoming this resistance I have brought
back the dream to his memory.

In the same way the patient, having reached a certain part of the work, may recall a dream which occurred three,
four, or more days ago, and which has hitherto remained in oblivion. 1

1 Ernest Jones describes an analogous case of frequent occurrence; during the analysis of
one dream another dream of the same night is often recalled which until then was not merely forgotten, but was not even
suspected.

Psycho-analytical experience has furnished us with yet another proof of the fact that the forgetting of dreams
depends far more on the resistance than on the mutually alien character of the waking and sleeping states, as some
writers have believed it to depend. It often happens to me, as well as to other analysts, and to patients under
treatment, that we are waked from sleep by a dream, as we say, and that immediately thereafter, while in full
possession of our mental faculties, we begin to interpret the dream. Often in such cases I have not rested until I have
achieved a full understanding of the dream, and yet it has happened that after waking I have forgotten the
interpretation — work as completely as I have forgotten the dream-content itself, though I have been aware that I have
dreamed and that I had interpreted the dream. The dream has far more frequently taken the result of the interpretation
with it into forgetfulness than the intellectual faculty has succeeded in retaining the dream in the memory. But
between this work of interpretation and the waking thoughts there is not that psychic abyss by which other writers have
sought to explain the forgetting of dreams. When Morton Prince objects to my explanation of the forgetting of dreams on
the ground that it is only a special case of the amnesia of dissociated psychic states, and that the impossibility of
applying my explanation of this special amnesia to other types of amnesia makes it valueless even for its immediate
purpose, he reminds the reader that in all his descriptions of such dissociated states he has never attempted to
discover the dynamic explanation underlying these phenomena. For had he done so, he would surely have discovered that
repression (and the resistance produced thereby) is the cause not of these dissociations merely, but also of the
amnesia of their psychic content.

That dreams are as little forgotten as other psychic acts, that even in their power of impressing themselves on the
memory they may fairly be compared with the other psychic performances, was proved to me by an experiment which I was
able to make while preparing the manuscript of this book. I had preserved in my notes a great many dreams of my own
which, for one reason or another, I could not interpret, or, at the time of dreaming them, could interpret only very
imperfectly. In order to obtain material to illustrate my assertion, I attempted to interpret some of them a year or
two later. In this attempt I was invariably successful; indeed, I may say that the interpretation was effected more
easily after all this time than when the dreams were of recent occurrence. As a possible explanation of this fact, I
would suggest that I had overcome many of the internal resistances which had disturbed me at the time of dreaming. In
such subsequent interpretations I have compared the old yield of dream-thoughts with the present result, which has
usually been more abundant, and I have invariably found the old dream-thoughts unaltered among the present ones.
However, I soon recovered from my surprise when I reflected that I had long been accustomed to interpret dreams of
former years that had occasionally been related to me by my patients as though they had been dreams of the night
before; by the same method, and with the same success. In the section on anxiety-dreams I shall include two examples of
such delayed dream-interpretations. When I made this experiment for the first time I expected, not unreasonably, that
dreams would behave in this connection merely like neurotic symptoms. For when I treat a psychoneurotic for instance,
an hysterical patient, by psychoanalysis, I am compelled to find explanations for the first symptoms of the malady,
which have long since disappeared, as well as for those still existing symptoms which have brought the patient to me;
and I find the former problem easier to solve than the more exigent one of today. In the Studies in Hysteria,
1 published as early as 1895, I was able to give the explanation of a first hysterical attack which the
patient, a woman over forty years of age, had experienced in her fifteenth year. 2

1 Studien uber Hysterie, Case II.

2 Dreams which have occurred during the first years of childhood, and which have sometimes
been retained in the memory for decades with perfect sensorial freshness, are almost always of great importance for the
understanding of the development and the neurosis of the dreamer. The analysis of them protects the physician from
errors and uncertainties which might confuse him even theoretically.

I will now make a few rather unsystematic remarks relating to the interpretations of dreams, which will perhaps
serve as a guide to the reader who wishes to test my assertions by the analysis of his own dreams.

He must not expect that it will be a simple and easy matter to interpret his own dreams. Even the observation of
endoptic phenomena, and other sensations which are commonly immune from attention, calls for practice, although this
group of observations is not opposed by any psychic motive. It is very much more difficult to get hold of the unwished
ideas. He who seeks to do so must fulfil the requirements laid down in this treatise, and while following the rules
here given, he must endeavour to restrain all criticism, all preconceptions, and all affective or intellectual bias in
himself during the work of analysis. He must be ever mindful of the precept which Claude Bernard held up to the
experimenter in the physiological laboratory: "Travailler comme une bete" — that is, he must be as enduring as an
animal, and also as disinterested in the results of his work. He who will follow this advice will no longer find the
task a difficult one. The interpretation of a dream cannot always be accomplished in one session; after following up a
chain of associations you will often feel that your working capacity is exhausted; the dream will not tell you anything
more that day; it is then best to break off, and to resume the work the following day. Another portion of the
dream-content then solicits your attention, and you thus obtain access to a fresh stratum of the dream-thoughts. One
might call this the fractional interpretation of dreams.

It is most difficult to induce the beginner in dream-interpretation to recognize the fact that his task is not
finished when he is in possession of a complete interpretation of the dream which is both ingenious and coherent, and
which gives particulars of all the elements of the dream-content. Besides this, another interpretation, an
over-interpretation of the same dream, one which has escaped him, may be possible. It is really not easy to form an
idea of the wealth of trains of unconscious thought striving for expression in our minds, or to credit the adroitness
displayed by the dream-work in killing — so to speak — seven flies at one stroke, like the journeyman tailor in the
fairy-tale, by means of its ambiguous modes of expression. The reader will constantly be inclined to reproach the
author for a superfluous display of ingenuity, but anyone who has had personal experience of dream-interpretation will
know better than to do so.

On the other hand, I cannot accept the opinion, first expressed by H. Silberer, that every dream — or even that many
dreams, and certain groups of dreams — calls for two different interpretations, between which there is even supposed to
be a fixed relation. One of these, which Silberer calls the psycho — analytic interpretation, attributes to the dream
any meaning you please, but in the main an infantile sexual one. The other, the more important interpretation, which he
calls the anagogic interpretation, reveals the more serious and often profound thoughts which the dream-work has used
as its material. Silberer does not prove this assertion by citing a number of dreams which he has analysed in these two
directions. I am obliged to object to this opinion on the ground that it is contrary to facts. The majority of dreams
require no over-interpretation, and are especially insusceptible of an anagogic interpretation. The influence of a
tendency which seeks to veil the fundamental conditions of dream-formation and divert our interest from its instinctual
roots is as evident in Silberer's theory as in other theoretical efforts of the last few years. In a number of cases I
can confirm Silberer's assertions; but in these the analysis shows me that the dream-work was confronted with the task
of transforming a series of highly abstract thoughts, incapable of direct representation, from waking life into a
dream. The dream-work attempted to accomplish this task by seizing upon another thought-material which stood in loose
and often allegorical relation to the abstract thoughts, and thereby diminished the difficulty of representing them.
The abstract interpretation of a dream originating in this manner will be given by the dreamer immediately, but the
correct interpretation of the substituted material can be obtained only by means of the familiar technique.

The question whether every dream can be interpreted is to be answered in the negative. One should not forget that in
the work of interpretation one is opposed by the psychic forces that are responsible for the distortion of the dream.
Whether one can master the inner resistances by one's intellectual interest, one's capacity for self-control, one's
psychological knowledge, and one's experience in dream-interpretation depends on the relative strength of the opposing
forces. It is always possible to make some progress; one can at all events go far enough to become convinced that a
dream has meaning, and generally far enough to gain some idea of its meaning. It very often happens that a second dream
enables us to confirm and continue the interpretation assumed for the first. A whole series of dreams, continuing for
weeks or months, may have a common basis, and should therefore be interpreted as a continuity. In dreams that follow
one another, we often observe that one dream takes as its central point something that is only alluded to in the
periphery of the next dream, and conversely, so that even in their interpretations the two supplement each other. That
different dreams of the same night are always to be treated, in the work of interpretation, as a whole, I have already
shown by examples.

In the best interpreted dreams we often have to leave one passage in obscurity because we observe during the
interpretation that we have here a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled, and which furnishes no fresh
contribution to the dream-content. This, then, is the keystone of the dream, the point at which it ascends into the
unknown. For the dream-thoughts which we encounter during the interpretation commonly have no termination, but run in
all directions into the net-like entanglement of our intellectual world. It is from some denser part of this fabric
that the dream-wish then arises, like the mushroom from its mycelium.

Let us now return to the facts of dream-forgetting. So far, of course, we have failed to draw any important
conclusion from them. When our waking life shows an unmistakable intention to forget the dream which has been formed
during the night, either as a whole, immediately after waking, or little by little in the course of the day, and when
we recognize as the chief factor in this process of forgetting the psychic resistance against the dream which has
already done its best to oppose the dream at night, the question then arises: What actually has made the dream-
formation possible against this resistance? Let us consider the most striking case, in which the waking life has thrust
the dream aside as though it had never happened. If we take into consideration the play of the psychic forces, we are
compelled to assert that the dream would never have come into existence had the resistance prevailed at night as it did
by day. We conclude, then, that the resistance loses some part of its force during the night; we know that it has not
been discontinued, as we have demonstrated its share in the formation of dreams — namely, the work of distortion. We
have therefore to consider the possibility that at night the resistance is merely diminished, and that dream-formation
becomes possible because of this slackening of the resistance; and we shall readily understand that as it regains its
full power on waking it immediately thrusts aside what it was forced to admit while it was feeble. Descriptive
psychology teaches us that the chief determinant of dream-formation is the dormant state of the psyche; and we may now
add the following explanation: The state of sleep makes dream-formation possible by reducing the endopsychic
censorship.

We are certainly tempted to look upon this as the only possible conclusion to be drawn from the facts of
dream-forgetting, and to develop from this conclusion further deductions as to the comparative energy operative in the
sleeping and waking states. But we shall stop here for the present. When we have penetrated a little farther into the
psychology of dreams we shall find that the origin of dream-formation may be differently conceived. The resistance
which tends to prevent the dream-thoughts from becoming conscious may perhaps be evaded without suffering reduction. It
is also plausible that both the factors which favour dream-formation, the reduction as well as the evasion of the
resistance, may be simultaneously made possible by the sleeping state. But we shall pause here, and resume the subject
a little later.

We must now consider another series of objections against our procedure in dream-interpretation. For we proceed by
dropping all the directing ideas which at other times control reflection, directing our attention to a single element
of the dream, noting the involuntary thoughts that associate themselves with this element. We then take up the next
component of the dream-content, and repeat the operation with this; and, regardless of the direction taken by the
thoughts, we allow ourselves to be led onwards by them, rambling from one subject to another. At the same time, we
harbour the confident hope that we may in the end, and without intervention on our part, come upon the dream-thoughts
from which the dream originated. To this the critic may make the following objection: That we arrive somewhere if we
start from a single element of the dream is not remarkable. Something can be associatively connected with every idea.
The only thing that is remarkable is that one should succeed in hitting upon the dream-thoughts in this arbitrary and
aimless excursion. It is probably a self-deception; the investigator follows the chain of associations from the one
element which is taken up until he finds the chain breaking off, whereupon he takes up a second element; it is thus
only natural that the originally unconfined associations should now become narrowed down. He has the former chain of
associations still in mind, and will therefore in the analysis of the second dream-idea hit all the more readily upon
single associations which have something in common with the associations of the first chain. He then imagines that he
has found a thought which represents a point of junction between two of the dream-elements. As he allows himself all
possible freedom of thought-connection, excepting only the transitions from one idea to another which occur in normal
thinking, it is not difficult for him finally to concoct out of a series of intermediary thoughts, something which he
calls the dream-thoughts; and without any guarantee, since they are otherwise unknown, he palms these off as the
psychic equivalent of the dream. But all this is a purely arbitrary procedure, an ingenious-looking exploitation of
chance, and anyone who will go to this useless trouble can in this way work out any desired interpretation for any
dream whatever.

If such objections are really advanced against us, we may in defence refer to the impression produced by our dream-
interpretations, the surprising connections with other dream-elements which appear while we are following up the
individual ideas, and the improbability that anything which so perfectly covers and explains the dream as do our
dream-interpretations could be achieved otherwise than by following previously established psychic connections. We
might also point to the fact that the procedure in dream-interpretation is identical with the procedure followed in the
resolution of hysterical symptoms, where the correctness of the method is attested by the emergence and disappearance
of the symptoms — that is, where the interpretation of the text is confirmed by the interpolated illustrations. But we
have no reason to avoid this problem — namely, how one can arrive at a pre-existent aim by following an arbitrarily and
aimlessly maundering chain of thoughts — since we shall be able not to solve the problem, it is true, but to get rid of
it entirely.

For it is demonstrably incorrect to state that we abandon ourselves to an aimless excursion of thought when, as in
the interpretation of dreams, we renounce reflection and allow the involuntary ideas to come to the surface. It can be
shown that we are able to reject only those directing ideas which are known to us, and that with the cessation of these
the unknown — or, as we inexactly say, unconscious — directing ideas immediately exert their influence, and henceforth
determine the flow of the involuntary ideas. Thinking without directing ideas cannot be ensured by any influence we
ourselves exert on our own psychic life; neither do I know of any state of psychic derangement in which such a mode of
thought establishes itself. 1 The psychiatrists have here far too prematurely relinquished the idea of the
solidity of the psychic structure. I know that an unregulated stream of thoughts, devoid of directing ideas, can occur
as little in the realm of hysteria and paranoia as in the formation or solution of dreams. Perhaps it does not occur at
all in the endogenous psychic affections, and, according to the ingenious hypothesis of Lauret, even the deliria
observed in confused psychic states have meaning and are incomprehensible to us only because of omissions. I have had
the same conviction whenever I have had an opportunity of observing such states. The deliria are the work of a
censorship which no longer makes any effort to conceal its sway, which, instead of lending its support to a revision
that is no longer obnoxious to it, cancels regardlessly anything to which it objects, thus causing the remnant to
appear disconnected. This censorship proceeds like the Russian censorship on the frontier, which allows only those
foreign journals which have had certain passages blacked out to fall into the bands of the readers to be protected.

1 Only recently has my attention been called to the fact that Ed. von Hartmann took the same
view with regard to this psychologically important point: Incidental to the discussion of the role of the unconscious
in artistic creation (Philos. d. Unbew., Vol. i, Sect. B., Chap. V) Eduard von Hartmann clearly enunciated the law of
association of ideas which is directed by unconscious directing ideas, without however realizing the scope of this law.
With him it was a question of demonstrating that "every combination of a sensuous idea when it is not left entirely to
chance, but is directed to a definite end, is in need of help from the unconscious," and that the conscious interest in
any particular thought-association is a stimulus for the unconscious to discover from among the numberless possible
ideas the one which corresponds to the directing idea. "It is the unconscious that selects, and appropriately, in
accordance with the aims of the interest: and this holds true for the associations in abstract thinking (as sensible
representations and artistic combinations as well as for flashes of wit)." Hence, a limiting of the association of
ideas to ideas that evoke and are evoked in the sense of pure association-psychology is untenable. Such a restriction
"would be justified only if there were states in human life in which man was free not only from any conscious purpose,
but also from the domination or cooperation of any unconscious interest, any passing mood. But such a state hardly ever
comes to pass, for even if one leaves one's train of thought seemingly altogether to chance, or if one surrenders
oneself entirely to the involuntary dreams of phantasy, yet always other leading interests, dominant feelings and moods
prevail at one time rather than another, and these will always exert an influence on the association of ideas."
(Philos. d. Unbew., IIe, Aufl. i. 246). In semi-conscious dreams there always appear only such ideas as correspond to
the (unconscious) momentary main interest. By rendering prominent the feelings and moods over the free thought-series,
the methodical procedure of psycho-analysis is thoroughly justified even from the standpoint of Hartmann's Psychology
(N. E. Pohorilles, Internat. Zeitschrift. f. Ps. A., I, [1913], p. 605). Du Prel concludes from the fact that a name
which we vainly try to recall suddenly occurs to the mind that there is an unconscious but none the less purposeful
thinking, whose result then appears in consciousness (Philos. d. Mystik, p. 107).

The free play of ideas following any chain of associations may perhaps occur in cases of destructive organic
affections of the brain. What, however, is taken to be such in the psychoneuroses may always be explained as the
influence of the censorship on a series of thoughts which have been pushed into the foreground by the concealed
directing ideas. 1 It has been considered an unmistakable sign of free association unencumbered by directing
ideas if the emerging ideas (or images) appear to be connected by means of the so-called superficial associations —
that is, by assonance, verbal ambiguity, and temporal coincidence, without inner relationship of meaning; in other
words, if they are connected by all those associations which we allow ourselves to exploit in wit and playing upon
words. This distinguishing mark holds good with associations which lead us from the elements of the dream-content to
the intermediary thoughts, and from these to the dream-thoughts proper; in many analyses of dreams we have found
surprising examples of this. In these no connection was too loose and no witticism too objectionable to serve as a
bridge from one thought to another. But the correct understanding of such surprising tolerance is not far to seek.
Whenever one psychic element is connected with another by an obnoxious and superficial association, there exists also a
correct and more profound connection between the two, which succumbs to the resistance of the censorship.

The correct explanation for the predominance of the superficial associations is the pressure of the censorship, and
not the suppression of the directing ideas. Whenever the censorship renders the normal connective paths impassable, the
superficial associations will replace the deeper ones in the representation. It is as though in a mountainous region a
general interruption of traffic, for example an inundation, should render the broad highways impassable: traffic would
then have to be maintained by steep and inconvenient tracks used at other times only by the hunter.

We can here distinguish two cases which, however, are essentially one. In the first case, the censorship is directed
only against the connection of two thoughts which, being detached from one another, escape its opposition. The two
thoughts then enter successively into consciousness; their connection remains concealed; but in its place there occurs
to us a superficial connection between the two which would not otherwise have occurred to us, and which as a rule
connects with another angle of the conceptual complex instead of that from which the suppressed but essential
connection proceeds. Or, in the second case, both thoughts, owing to their content, succumb to the censorship; both
then appear not in their correct form but in a modified, substituted form; and both substituted thoughts are so
selected as to represent, by a superficial association, the essential relation which existed between those that they
have replaced. Under the pressure of the censorship, the displacement of a normal and vital association by one
superficial and apparently absurd has thus occurred in both cases.

Because we know of these displacements, we unhesitatingly rely upon even the superficial associations which occur in
the course of dream-interpretation. 1

1 The same considerations naturally hold good of the case in which superficial associations
are exposed in the dream-content, as, for example, in both the dreams reported by Maury (p. 50, pelerinage — pelletier
— pelle, kilometer- kilograms — gilolo, Lobelia — Lopez — Lotto). I know from my work with neurotics what kind of
reminiscence is prone to represent itself in this manner. It is the consultation of encyclopedias by which most people
have satisfied their need of an explanation of the sexual mystery when obsessed by the curiosity of puberty.

The psycho-analysis of neurotics makes abundant use of the two principles: that with the abandonment of the
conscious directing ideas the control over the flow of ideas is transferred to the concealed directing ideas; and that
superficial associations are only a displacement-substitute for suppressed and more profound ones. Indeed,
psycho-analysis makes these two principles the foundation-stones of its technique. When I request a patient to dismiss
all reflection, and to report to me whatever comes into his mind, I firmly cling to the assumption that he will not be
able to drop the directing idea of the treatment, and I feel justified in concluding that what he reports, even though
it may seem to be quite ingenuous and arbitrary, has some connection with his morbid state. Another directing idea of
which the patient has no suspicion is my own personality. The full appreciation, as well as the detailed proof of both
these explanations, belongs to the description of the psycho-analytic technique as a therapeutic method. We have here
reached one of the junctions, so to speak, at which we purposely drop the subject of dream-interpretation.
1

1 The above statements, which when written sounded very improbable, have since been
corroborated and applied experimentally by Jung and his pupils in the Diagnostiche Assoziationsstudien.

Of all the objections raised, only one is justified and still remains to be met; namely, that we ought not to
ascribe all the associations of the interpretation-work to the nocturnal dream-work. By interpretation in the waking
state we are actually opening a path running back from the dream-elements to the dream-thoughts. The dream-work has
followed the contrary direction, and it is not at all probable that these paths are equally passable in opposite
directions. On the contrary, it appears that during the day, by means of new thought-connections, we sink shafts that
strike the intermediary thoughts and the dream-thoughts now in this place, now in that. We can see how the recent
thought — material of the day forces its way into the interpretation — series, and how the additional resistance which
has appeared since the night probably compels it to make new and further detours. But the number and form of the
collaterals which we thus contrive during the day are, psychologically speaking, indifferent, so long as they point the
way to the dream-thoughts which we are seeking.

B. Regression

Now that we have defended ourselves against the objections raised, or have at least indicated our weapons of
defence, we must no longer delay entering upon the psychological investigations for which we have so long been
preparing. Let us summarize the main results of our recent investigations: The dream is a psychic act full of import;
its motive power is invariably a wish craving fulfilment; the fact that it is unrecognizable as a wish, and its many
peculiarities and absurdities, are due to the influence of the psychic censorship to which it has been subjected during
its formation. Besides the necessity of evading the censorship, the following factors have played a part in its
formation: first, a need for condensing the psychic material; second, regard for representability in sensory images;
and third (though not constantly), regard for a rational and intelligible exterior of the dream-structure. From each of
these propositions a path leads onward to psychological postulates and assumptions. Thus, the reciprocal relation of
the wish-motives, and the four conditions. as well as the mutual relations of these conditions, must now be
investigated; the dream must be inserted in the context of the psychic life.

At the beginning of this section we cited a certain dream in order that it might remind us of the problems that are
still unsolved. The interpretation of this dream (of the burning child) presented no difficulties, although in the
analytical sense it was not given in full. We asked ourselves why, after all, it was necessary that the father should
dream instead of waking, and we recognized the wish to represent the child as living as a motive of the dream. That
there was yet another wish operative in the dream we shall be able to show after further discussion. For the present,
however, we may say that for the sake of the wish — fulfilment the thought-process of sleep was transformed into a
dream.

If the wish-fulfilment is cancelled out, only one characteristic remains which distinguishes the two kinds of
psychic events. The dream-thought would have been: "I see a glimmer coming from the room in which the body is lying.
Perhaps a candle has fallen over, and the child is burning!" The dream reproduces the result of this reflection
unchanged, but represents it in a situation which exists in the present and is perceptible by the senses like an
experience of the waking state. This, however, is the most common and the most striking psychological characteristic of
the dream; a thought, usually the one wished for, is objectified in the dream, and represented as a scene, or — as we
think — experienced.

But how are we now to explain this characteristic peculiarity of the dream-work, or — to put it more modestly — how
are we to bring it into relation with the psychic processes?

On closer examination, it is plainly evident that the manifest form of the dream is marked by two characteristics
which are almost independent of each other. One is its representation as a present situation with the omission of
perhaps; the other is the translation of the thought into visual images and speech.

The transformation to which the dream-thoughts are subjected because the expectation is put into the present tense
is, perhaps, in this particular dream not so very striking. This is probably due to the special and really subsidiary
role of the wish-fulfilment in this dream. Let us take another dream, in which the dream-wish does not break away from
the continuation of the waking thoughts in sleep; for example, the dream of Irma's injection. Here the dream-thought
achieving representation is in the conditional: "If only Otto could be blamed for Irma's illness!" The dream suppresses
the conditional, and replaces it by a simple present tense: "Yes, Otto is to blame for Irma's illness." This, then, is
the first of the transformations which even the undistorted dream imposes on the dream-thoughts. But we will not linger
over this first peculiarity of the dream. We dispose of it by a reference to the conscious phantasy, the day — dream,
which behaves in a similar fashion with its conceptual content. When Daudet's M. Joyeuse wanders unemployed through the
streets of Paris while his daughter is led to believe that he has a post and is sitting in his office, he dreams, in
the present tense, of circumstances that might help him to obtain a recommendation and employment. The dream, then,
employs the present tense in the same manner and with the same right as the day-dream. The present is the tense in
which the wish is represented as fulfilled.

The second quality peculiar to the dream alone, as distinguished from the day-dream, is that the conceptual content
is not thought, but is transformed into visual images, to which we give credence, and which we believe that we
experience. Let us add. however, that not all dreams show this transformation of ideas into visual images. There are
dreams which consist solely of thoughts, but we cannot on that account deny that they are substantially dreams. My
dream Autodidasker — the day-phantasy about Professor N is of this character; it is almost as free of visual elements
as though I had thought its content during the day. Moreover, every long dream contains elements which have not
undergone this transformation into the visual, and which are simply thought or known as we are wont to think or know in
our waking state. And we must here reflect that this transformation of ideas into visual images does not occur in
dreams alone, but also in hallucinations and visions, which may appear spontaneously in health, or as symptoms in the
psychoneuroses. In brief, the relation which we are here investigating is by no means an exclusive one; the fact
remains, however, that this characteristic of the dream, whenever it occurs, seems to be its most noteworthy
characteristic, so that we cannot think of the dream-life without it. To understand it, however, requires a very
exhaustive discussion.

Among all the observations relating to the theory of dreams to be found in the literature of the subject, I should
like to lay stress upon one as being particularly worthy of mention. The famous G. T. H. Fechner makes the conjecture,
1 in a discussion as to the nature of the dreams, that the dream is staged elsewhere than in the waking
ideation. No other assumption enables us to comprehend the special peculiarities of the dream-life.

1 Psychophysik, Part. II, p. 520.

The idea which is thus put before us is one of psychic locality. We shall wholly ignore the fact that the psychic
apparatus concerned is known to us also as an anatomical preparation, and we shall carefully avoid the temptation to
determine the psychic locality in any anatomical sense. We shall remain on psychological ground, and we shall do no
more than accept the invitation to think of the instrument which serves the psychic activities much as we think of a
compound microscope, a photographic camera, or other apparatus. The psychic locality, then, corresponds to a place
within such an apparatus in which one of the preliminary phases of the image comes into existence. As is well known,
there are in the microscope and the telescope such ideal localities or planes, in which no tangible portion of the
apparatus is located. I think it superfluous to apologize for the imperfections of this and all similar figures. These
comparisons are designed only to assist us in our attempt to make intelligible the complication of the psychic
performance by dissecting it and referring the individual performances to the individual components of the apparatus.
So far as I am aware, no attempt has yet been made to divine the construction of the psychic instrument by means of
such dissection. I see no harm in such an attempt; I think that we should give free rein to our conjectures, provided
we keep our heads and do not mistake the scaffolding for the building. Since for the first approach to any unknown
subject we need the help only of auxiliary ideas, we shall prefer the crudest and most tangible hypothesis to all
others.

Accordingly, we conceive the psychic apparatus as a compound instrument, the component parts of which we shall call
instances, or, for the sake of clearness, systems. We shall then anticipate that these systems may perhaps maintain a
constant spatial orientation to one another, very much as do the different and successive systems of lenses of a
telescope. Strictly speaking, there is no need to assume an actual spatial arrangement of the psychic system. It will
be enough for our purpose if a definite sequence is established, so that in certain psychic events the system will be
traversed by the excitation in a definite temporal order. This order may be different in the case of other processes;
such a possibility is left open. For the sake of brevity, we shall henceforth speak of the component parts of the
apparatus as Psi-systems.

The first thing that strikes us is the fact that the apparatus composed of Psi-systems has a direction. All our
psychic activities proceed from (inner or outer) stimuli and terminate in innervations. We thus ascribe to the
apparatus a sensory and a motor end; at the sensory end we find a system which receives the perceptions, ind at the
motor end another which opens the sluices of motility. The psychic process generally runs from the perceptive end to
the motor end. The most general scheme of the psychic apparatus has therefore the following appearance as shown in Fig.
1. (See illustration.) But this is only in compliance with the requirement, long familiar to us, that the psychic
apparatus must be constructed like a reflex apparatus. The reflex act remains the type of every psychic activity as
well.

We now have reason to admit a first differentiation at the sensory end. The percepts that come to us leave in our
psychic apparatus a trace, which we may call a memory-trace. The function related to this memory-trace we call the
memory. If we hold seriously to our resolution to connect the psychic processes into systems, the memory-trace can
consist only of lasting changes in the elements of the systems. But, as has already been shown elsewhere, obvious
difficulties arise when one and the same system is faithfully to preserve changes in its elements and still to remain
fresh and receptive in respect of new occasions of change. In accordance with the principle which is directing our
attempt, we shall therefore ascribe these two functions to two different systems. We assume that an initial system of
this apparatus receives the stimuli of perception but retains nothing of them — that is, it has no memory; and that
behind this there lies a second system, which transforms the momentary excitation of the first into lasting traces. The
following would then be the diagram of our psychic apparatus: (See illustration.)

We know that of the percepts which act upon the P-system, we retain permanently something else as well as the
content itself. Our percepts prove also to be connected with one another in the memory, and this is especially so if
they originally occurred simultaneously. We call this the fact of association. It is now clear that, if the P-system is
entirely lacking in memory, it certainly cannot preserve traces for the associations; the individual P-elements would
be intolerably hindered in their functioning if a residue of a former connection should make its influence felt against
a new perception. Hence we must rather assume that the memory-system is the basis of association. The fact of
association, then, consists in this — that in consequence of a lessening of resistance and a smoothing of the ways from
one of the mem-elements, the excitation transmits itself to a second rather than to a third mem-element.

On further investigation we find it necessary to assume not one but many such mem-systems, in which the same
excitation transmitted by the P-elements undergoes a diversified fixation. The first of these mem-systems will in any
case contain the fixation of the association through simultaneity, while in those lying farther away the same material
of excitation will be arranged according to other forms of combination; so that relationships of similarity, etc.,
might perhaps be represented by these later systems. It would, of course, be idle to attempt to express in words the
psychic significance of such a system. Its characteristic would lie in the intimacy of its relations to elements of raw
material of memory — that is (if we wish to hint at a more comprehensive theory) in the gradations of the conductive
resistance on the way to these elements.

An observation of a general nature, which may possibly point to something of importance, may here be interpolated.
The P-system, which possesses no capacity for preserving changes, and hence no memory, furnishes to consciousness the
complexity and variety of the sensory qualities. Our memories, on the other hand, are unconscious in themselves; those
that are most deeply impressed form no exception. They can be made conscious, but there is no doubt that they unfold
all their activities in the unconscious state. What we term our character is based, indeed, on the memory — traces of
our impressions, and it is precisely those impressions that have affected us most strongly, those of our early youth,
which hardly ever become conscious. But when memories become conscious again they show no sensory quality, or a very
negligible one in comparison with the perceptions. If, now, it can be confirmed that for consciousness memory and
quality are mutually exclusive in the Psi-systems, we have gained a most promising insight into the determinations of
the neuron excitations. 1

1 Since writing this, I have thought that consciousness occurs actually in the locality of
the memory-trace.

What we have so far assumed concerning the composition of the psychic apparatus at the sensible end has been assumed
regardless of dreams and of the psychological explanations which we have hitherto derived from them. Dreams, however,
will serve as a source of evidence for our knowledge of another part of the apparatus. We have seen that it was
impossible to explain dream-formation unless we ventured to assume two psychic instances, one of which subjected the
activities of the other to criticism, the result of which was exclusion from consciousness.

We have concluded that the criticizing instance maintains closer relations with the consciousness than the instance
criticized. It stands between the latter and the consciousness like a screen. Further, we have found that there is
reason to identify the criticizing instance with that which directs our waking life and determines our voluntary
conscious activities. If, in accordance with our assumptions, we now replace these instances by systems, the
criticizing system will therefore be moved to the motor end. We now enter both systems in our diagram, expressing, by
the names given them, their relation to consciousness. (See illustration.)

The last of the systems at the motor end we call the preconscious (Pcs.) to denote that the exciting processes in
this system can reach consciousness without any further detention, provided certain other conditions are fulfilled,
e.g., the attainment of a definite degree of intensity, a certain apportionment of that function which we must call
attention, etc. This is at the same time the system which holds the keys of voluntary motility. The system behind it we
call the unconscious (Ucs), because it has no access to consciousness except through the preconscious, in the passage
through which the excitation-process must submit to certain changes. 1

1 The further elaboration of this linear diagram will have to reckon with the assumption
that the system following the Pcs represents the one to which we must attribute consciousness (Cs), so that P = Cs.

In which of these systems, then, do we localize the impetus to dream-formation? For the sake of simplicity, let us
say in the system Ucs. We shall find, it is true, in subsequent discussions, that this is not altogether correct; that
dream-formation is obliged to make connection with dream-thoughts which belong to the system of the preconscious. But
we shall learn elsewhere, when we come to deal with the dream-wish, that the motive-power of the dream is furnished by
the Ucs, and on account of this factor we shall assume the unconscious system as the starting — point for
dream-formation. This dream-excitation, like all the other thought-structures, will now strive to continue itself in
the Pcs, and thence to gain admission to the consciousness.

Experience teaches us that the path leading through the preconscious to consciousness is closed to the
dream-thoughts during the day by the resisting censorship. At night they gain admission to consciousness; the question
arises: In what way and because of what changes? If this admission were rendered possible to the dream-thoughts by the
weakening, during the night, of the resistance watching on the boundary between the unconscious and the preconscious,
we should then have dreams in the material of our ideas, which would not display the hallucinatory character that
interests us at present.

The weakening of the censorship between the two systems, Ucs and Pcs, can explain to us only such dreams as the
Autodidasker dream but not dreams like that of the burning child, which — as will be remembered — we stated as a
problem at the outset in our present investigations.

What takes place in the hallucinatory dream we can describe in no other way than by saying that the excitation
follows a retrogressive course. It communicates itself not to the motor end of the apparatus, but to the sensory end,
and finally reaches the system of perception. If we call the direction which the psychic process follows from the
unconscious into the waking state progressive, we may then speak of the dream as having a regressive character.
1

1 The first indication of the element of regression is already encountered in the writings
of Albertus Magnus. According to him the imaginatio constructs the dream out of the tangible objects which it has
retained. The process is the converse of that operating in the waking state. Hobbes states (Leviathan, ch. 2): "In sum
our dreams are the reverse of our imagination, the motion, when we are awake, beginning at one end, and when we dream
at another" (quoted by Havelock Ellis, loc. cit., p. 112).

This regression is therefore assuredly one of the most important psychological peculiarities of the dream-process;
but we must not forget that it is not characteristic of the dream alone. Intentional recollection and other component
processes of our normal thinking likewise necessitate a retrogression in the psychic apparatus from some complex act of
ideation to the raw material of the memory-traces which underlie it. But during the waking state this turning backwards
does not reach beyond the memory-images; it is incapable of producing the hallucinatory revival of the perceptual
images. Why is it otherwise in dreams? When we spoke of the condensation-work of the dream we could not avoid the
assumption that by the dream-work the intensities adhering to the ideas are completely transferred from one to another.
It is probably this modification of the usual psychic process which makes possible the cathexis 1 of the
system of P to its full sensory vividness in the reverse direction to thinking.

1 From the Greek Kathexo, to occupy, used here in place of the author's term Besetzung, to
signify a charge or investment of energy. — TR.

I hope that we are not deluding ourselves as regards the importance of this present discussion. We have done nothing
more than give a name to an inexplicable phenomenon. We call it regression if the idea in the dream is changed back
into the visual image from which it once originated. But even this step requires justification. Why this definition if
it does not teach us anything new? Well, I believe that the word regression is of service to us, inasmuch as it
connects a fact familiar to us with the scheme of the psychic apparatus endowed with direction. At this point, and for
the first time, we shall profit by the fact that we have constructed such a scheme. For with the help of this scheme we
shall perceive, without further reflection, another peculiarity of dream-formation. If we look upon the dream as a
process of regression within the hypothetical psychic apparatus, we have at once an explanation of the empirically
proven fact that all thought-relations of the dream-thoughts are either lost in the dream-work or have difficulty in
achieving expression. According to our scheme, these thought-relations are contained not in the first mem-systems, but
in those lying farther to the front, and in the regression to the perceptual images they must forfeit expression. In
regression, the structure of the dream-thoughts breaks up into its raw material.

But what change renders possible this regression which is impossible during the day? Let us here be content with an
assumption. There must evidently be changes in the cathexis of the individual systems, causing the latter to become
more accessible or inaccessible to the discharge of the excitation; but in any such apparatus the same effect upon the
course of the excitation might be produced by more than one kind of change. We naturally think of the. sleeping state,
and of the many cathectic changes which this evokes at the sensory end of the apparatus. During the day there is a
continuous stream flowing from the Psi — system of the P toward the motility end; this current ceases at night, and can
no longer block the flow of the current of excitation in the opposite direction. This would appear to be that seclusion
from the outer world which, according to the theory of some writers, is supposed to explain the psychological character
of the dream. In the explanation of the regression of the dream we shall, however, have to take into account those
other regressions which occur during morbid waking states. In these other forms of regression the explanation just
given plainly leaves us in the lurch. Regression occurs in spite of the uninterrupted sensory current in a progressive
direction.

The hallucinations of hysteria and paranoia, as well as the visions of mentally normal persons, I would explain as
corresponding, in fact, to regressions, i.e., to thoughts transformed into images; and would assert that only such
thoughts undergo this transformation as are in intimate connection with suppressed memories, or with memories which
have remained unconscious. As an example, I will cite the case of one of my youngest hysterical patients — a boy of
twelve, who was prevented from falling asleep by "green faces with red eyes," which terrified him. The source of this
manifestation was the suppressed, but once conscious memory of a boy whom he had often seen four years earlier, and who
offered a warning example of many bad habits, including masturbation, for which he was now reproaching himself. At that
time his mother had noticed that the complexion of this ill-mannered boy was greenish and that he had red (i.e.,
red-rimmed) eyes. Hence his terrifying vision, which merely determined his recollection of another saying of his
mother's, to the effect that such boys become demented, are unable to learn anything at school, and are doomed to an
early death. A part of this prediction came true in the case of my little patient; he could not get on at school, and,
as appeared from his involuntary associations, he was in terrible dread of the remainder of the prophecy. However,
after a brief period of successful treatment his sleep was restored, his anxiety removed, and he finished his
scholastic year with an excellent record.

Here I may add the interpretation of a vision described to me by an hysterical woman of forty, as having occurred
when she was in normal health. One morning she opened her eyes and saw her brother in the room, although she knew him
to be confined in an insane asylum. Her little son was asleep by her side. Lest the child should be frightened on
seeing his uncle, and fall into convulsions, she pulled the sheet over his face. This done, the phantom disappeared.
This apparition was the revision of one of her childish memories, which, although conscious, was most intimately
connected with all the unconscious material in her mind. Her nurserymaid had told her that her mother, who had died
young (my patient was then only eighteen months old), had suffered from epileptic or hysterical convulsions, which
dated back to a fright caused by her brother (the patient's uncle) who appeared to her disguised as a spectre with a
sheet over his head. The vision contains the same elements as the reminiscence, viz., the appearance of the brother,
the sheet, the fright, and its effect. These elements, however, are arranged in a fresh context, and are transferred to
other persons. The obvious motive of the vision, and the thought which it replaced, was her solicitude lest her little
son, who bore a striking resemblance to his uncle, should share the latter's fate.

Both examples here cited are not entirely unrelated to the state of sleep, and may for that reason be unfitted to
afford the evidence for the sake of which I have cited them. I will, therefore, refer to my analysis of an
hallucinatory paranoic woman patient 1 and to the results of my hitherto unpublished studies on the
psychology of the psychoneuroses, in order to emphasize the fact that in these cases of regressive thought —
transformation one must not overlook the influence of a suppressed memory, or one that has remained unconscious, this
being usually of an infantile character. This memory draws into the regression, as it were, the thoughts with which it
is connected, and which are kept from expression by the censorship — that is, into that form of representation in which
the memory itself is psychically existent. And here I may add, as a result of my studies of hysteria, that if one
succeeds in bringing to consciousness infantile scenes (whether they are recollections or phantasies) they appear as
hallucinations, and are divested of this character only when they are communicated. It is known also that even in
persons whose memories are not otherwise visual, the earliest infantile memories remain vividly visual until late in
life.

If, now, we bear in mind the part played in the dream-thoughts by the infantile experiences, or by the phantasies
based upon them, and recollect how often fragments of these re-emerge in the dream-content, and how even the
dream-wishes often proceed from them, we cannot deny the probability that in dreams, too, the transformation of
thoughts into visual images may be the result of the attraction exercised by the visually represented memory, striving
for resuscitation, upon the thoughts severed from the consciousness and struggling for expression. Pursuing this
conception. we may further describe the dream as the substitute for the infantile scene modified by transference to
recent material. The infantile scene cannot enforce its own revival, and must therefore be satisfied to return as a
dream.

This reference to the significance of the infantile scenes (or of their phantastic repetitions) as in a certain
degree furnishing the pattern for the dream-content renders superfluous the assumption made by Scherner and his pupils
concerning inner sources of stimuli. Scherner assumes a state of visual excitation, of internal excitation in the organ
of sight, when the dreams manifest a special vividness or an extraordinary abundance of visual elements. We need raise
no objection to this assumption; we may perhaps content ourselves with assuming such a state of excitation only for the
psychic perceptive system of the organ of vision; we shall, however, insist that this state of excitation is a
reanimation by the memory of a former actual visual excitation. I cannot, from my own experience, give a good example
showing such an influence of an infantile memory; my own dreams are altogether less rich in perceptual elements than I
imagine those of others to be; but in my most beautiful and most vivid dream of late years I can easily trace the
hallucinatory distinctness of the dream-contents to the visual qualities of recently received impressions. In chapter
VI., H, I mentioned a dream in which the dark blue of the water, the brown of the smoke issuing from the ship's
funnels, and the sombre brown and red of the buildings which I saw made a profound and lasting impression upon my mind.
This dream, if any, must be attributed to visual excitation, but what was it that had brought my organ of vision into
this excitable state? It was a recent impression which had joined itself to a series of former impressions. The colours
I beheld were in the first place those of the toy blocks with which my children had erected a magnificent building for
my admiration, on the day preceding the dream. There was the sombre red on the large blocks, the blue and brown on the
small ones. Joined to these were the colour impressions of my last journey in Italy: the beautiful blue of the Isonzo
and the lagoons, the brown hue of the Alps. The beautiful colours seen in the dream were but a repetition of those seen
in memory.

Let us summarize what we have learned about this peculiarity of dreams: their power of recasting their idea-content
in visual images. We may not have explained this character of the dream-work by referring it to the known laws of
psychology, but we have singled it out as pointing to unknown relations, and have given it the name of the regressive
character. Wherever such regression has occurred, we have regarded it as an effect of the resistance which opposes the
progress of thought on its normal way to consciousness, and of the simultaneous attraction exerted upon it by vivid
memories. 1 The regression in dreams is perhaps facilitated by the cessation of the progressive stream
flowing from the sense-organs during the day; for which auxiliary factor there must be some compensation, in the other
forms of regression, by the strengthening of the other regressive motives. We must also bear in mind that in
pathological cases of regression, just as in dreams, the process of energy-transference must be different from that
occurring in the regressions of normal psychic life, since it renders possible a full hallucinatory cathexis of the
perceptive system. What we have described in the analysis of the dream-work as regard for representability may be
referred to the selective attraction of visually remembered scenes touched by the dream-thoughts.

1 In a statement of the theory of repression it should be explained that a thought passes
into repression owing to the co — operation of two of the factors which influence it. On the one side (the censorship
of Cs) it is pushed, and from the other side (the Ucs) it is pulled, much as one is helped to the top of the Great
Pyramid. (Compare the paper Repression, p. 422 below.)

As to the regression, we may further observe that it plays a no less important part in the theory of neurotic
symptom-formation than in the theory of dreams. We may therefore distinguish a threefold species of regression: (a) a
topical one, in the sense of the scheme of the Psi-systems here exponded; (b) a temporal one, in so far as it is a
regression to older psychic formations; and (c) a formal one, when primitive modes of expression and representation
take the place of the customary modes. These three forms of regression are, however, basically one, and in the majority
of cases they coincide, for that which is older in point of time is at the same time formally primitive and, in the
psychic topography, nearer to the perception-end.

We cannot leave the theme of regression in dreams without giving utterance to an impression which has already and
repeatedly forced itself upon us, and which will return to us reinforced after a deeper study of the psychoneuroses:
namely, that dreaming is on the whole an act of regression to the earliest relationships of the dreamer, a
resuscitation of his childhood, of the impulses which were then dominant and the modes of expression which were then
available. Behind this childhood of the individual we are then promised an insight into the phylogenetic childhood,
into the evolution of the human race, of which the development of the individual is only an abridged repetition
influenced by the fortuitous circumstances of life. We begin to suspect that Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he said
that in a dream "there persists a primordial part of humanity which we can no longer reach by a direct path," and we
are encouraged to expect, from the analysis of dreams, a knowledge of the archaic inheritance of man, a knowledge of
psychical things in him that are innate. It would seem that dreams and neuroses have preserved for us more of the
psychical antiquities than we suspected; so that psycho-analysis may claim a high rank among those sciences which
endeavour to reconstruct the oldest and darkest phases of the beginnings of mankind.

It is quite possible that we shall not find this first part of our psychological evaluation of dreams particularly
satisfying. We must, however, console ourselves with the thought that we are, after all, compelled to build out into
the dark. If we have not gone altogether astray, we shall surely reach approximately the same place from another
starting-point, and then, perhaps, we shall be better able to find our bearings.

C. The Wish-Fulfilment

The dream of the burning child (cited above) affords us a welcome opportunity for appreciating the difficulties
confronting the theory of wish-fulfilment. That a dream should be nothing but a wish-fulfilment must undoubtedly seem
strange to us all — and not only because of the contradiction offered by the anxiety-dream. Once our first analyses had
given us the enlightenment that meaning and psychic value are concealed behind our dreams, we could hardly have
expected so unitary a determination of this meaning. According to the correct but summary definition of Aristotle, the
dream is a continuation of thinking in sleep. Now if, during the day, our thoughts perform such a diversity of psychic
acts — judgments, conclusions, the answering of objections, expectations, intentions, etc. — why should they be forced
at night to confine themselves to the production of wishes only? Are there not, on the contrary, many dreams that
present an altogether different psychic act in dream-form — for example, anxious care — and is not the father's
unusually transparent dream of the burning child such a dream? From the gleam of light that falls upon his eyes while
he is asleep the father draws the apprehensive conclusion that a candle has fallen over and may be burning the body; he
transforms this conclusion into a dream by embodying it in an obvious situation enacted in the present tense. What part
is played in this dream by the wish-fulfilment? And how can we possibly mistake the predominance of the thought
continued from the waking state or evoked by the new sensory impression?

All these considerations are justified, and force us to look more closely into the role of the wish-fulfilment in
dreams, and the significance of the waking thoughts continued in sleep.

It is precisely the wish-fulfilment that has already caused us to divide all dreams into two groups. We have found
dreams which were plainly wish-fulfilments; and others in which the wish — fulfilment was unrecognizable and was often
concealed by every available means. In this latter class of dreams we recognized the influence of the dream-censorship.
The undisguised wish-dreams were found chiefly in children; short, frank wish-dreams seemed (I purposely emphasize this
word) to occur also in adults.

We may now ask whence in each case does the wish that is realized in the dream originate? But to what opposition or
to what diversity do we relate this whence? I think to the opposition between conscious daily life and an unconscious
psychic activity which is able to make itself perceptible only at night. I thus, find a threefold possibility for the
origin of a wish. Firstly, it may have been excited during the day, and owing to external circumstances may have
remained unsatisfied; there is thus left for the night an acknowledged and unsatisfied wish. Secondly, it may have
emerged during the day, only to be rejected; there is thus left for the night an unsatisfied but suppressed wish.
Thirdly, it may have no relation to daily life, but may belong to those wishes which awake only at night out of the
suppressed material in us. If we turn to our scheme of the psychic apparatus, we can localize a wish of the first order
in the system Pcs. We may assume that a wish of the second order has been forced back from the Pcs system into the Ucs
system, where alone, if anywhere, can it maintain itself; as for the wish — impulse of the third order, we believe that
it is wholly incapable of leaving the Ucs system. Now, have the wishes arising from these different sources the same
value for the dream, the same power to incite a dream?

On surveying the dreams at our disposal with a view to answering this question, we are at once moved to add as a
fourth source of the dream-wish the actual wish-impetus which arises during the night (for example, the stimulus of
thirst, and sexual desire). It then seems to us probable that the source of the dream-wish does not affect its capacity
to incite a dream. I have in mind the dream of the child who continued the voyage that had been interrupted during the
day, and the other children's dreams cited in the same chapter; they are explained by an unfulfilled but unsuppressed
wish of the daytime. That wishes suppressed during the day assert themselves in dreams is shown by a great many
examples. I will mention a very simple dream of this kind. A rather sarcastic lady, whose younger friend has become
engaged to be married, is asked in the daytime by her acquaintances whether she knows her friend's fiance, and what she
thinks of him. She replies with unqualified praise, imposing silence on her own judgment, although she would have liked
to tell the truth, namely, that he is a commonplace fellow — one meets such by the dozen (Dutzendmensch). The following
night she dreams that the same question is put to her, and that she replies with the formula: "In case of subsequent
orders, it will suffice to mention the reference number." Finally, as the result of numerous analyses, we learn that
the wish in all dreams that have been subject to distortion has its origin in the unconscious, and could not become
perceptible by day. At first sight, then, it seems that in respect of dream-formation all wishes are of equal value and
equal power.

I cannot prove here that this is not really the true state of affairs, but I am strongly inclined to assume a
stricter determination of the dream-wish. Children's dreams leave us in no doubt that a wish unfulfilled during the day
may instigate a dream. But we must not forget that this is, after all, the wish of a child; that it is a wish-impulse
of the strength peculiar to childhood. I very much doubt whether a wish unfulfilled in the daytime would suffice to
create a dream in an adult. It would rather seem that, as we learn to control our instinctual life by intellection, we
more and more renounce as unprofitable the formation or retention of such intense wishes as are natural to childhood.
In this, indeed, there may be individual variations; some retain the infantile type of the psychic processes longer
than others; just as we find such differences in the gradual decline of the originally vivid visual imagination. In
general, however, I am of the opinion that unfulfilled wishes of the day are insufficient to produce a dream in adults.
I will readily admit that the wish-impulses originating in consciousness contribute to the instigation of dreams, but
they probably do no more. The dream would not occur if the preconscious wish were not reinforced from another
source.

That source is the unconscious. I believe that the conscious wish becomes effective in exciting a dream only when it
succeeds in arousing a similar unconscious wish which reinforces it. From the indications obtained in the
psychoanalysis of the neuroses, I believe that these unconscious wishes are always active and ready to express
themselves whenever they find an opportunity of allying themselves with an impulse from consciousness, and transferring
their own greater intensity to the lesser intensity of the latter. 1 It must, therefore, seem that the
conscious wish alone has been realized in the dream; but a slight peculiarity in the form of the dream will put us on
the track of the powerful ally from the unconscious. These ever-active and, as it were, immortal wishes of our
unconscious recall the legendary Titans who, from time immemorial, have been buried under the mountains which were once
hurled upon them by the victorious gods, and even now quiver from time to time at the convulsions of their mighty
limbs. These wishes, existing in repression, are themselves of infantile origin, as we learn from the psychological
investigation of the neuroses. Let me, therefore, set aside the view previously expressed, that it matters little
whence the dream-wish originates, and replace it by another, namely: the wish manifested in the dream must be an
infantile wish. In the adult it originates in the Ucs, while in the child, in whom no division and censorship exist as
yet between the Pcs and Ucs, or in whom these are only in process of formation, it is an unfulfilled and unrepressed
wish from the waking state. I am aware that this conception cannot be generally demonstrated, but I maintain that it
can often be demonstrated even where one would not have suspected it, and that it cannot be generally refuted.

1 They share this character of indestructibility with all other psychic acts that are really
unconscious — that is, with psychic acts belonging solely to the system Ucs. These paths are opened once and for all;
they never fall into disease; they conduct the excitation process to discharge as often as they are charged again with
unconscious excitation. To speak metaphorically, they suffer no other form of annihilation than did the shades of the
lower regions in the Odyssey, who awoke to new life the moment they drank blood. The processes depending on the
preconscious system are destructible in quite another sense. The psychotherapy of the neuroses is based on this
difference.

In dream-formation, the wish-impulses which are left over from the conscious waking life are, therefore, to be
relegated to the background. I cannot admit that they play any part except that attributed to the material of actual
sensations during sleep in relation to the dream-content. If I now take into account those other psychic instigations
left over from the waking life of the day, which are not wishes, I shall merely be adhering to the course mapped out
for me by this line of thought. We may succeed in provisionally disposing of the energetic cathexis of our waking
thoughts by deciding to go to sleep. He is a good sleeper who can do this; Napoleon I is reputed to have been a model
of this kind. But we do not always succeed in doing it, or in doing it completely. Unsolved problems, harassing cares,
overwhelming impressions, continue the activity of our thought even during sleep, maintaining psychic processes in the
system which we have termed the preconscious. The thought-impulses continued into sleep may be divided into the
following groups:

1. Those which have not been completed during the day, owing to some accidental cause.

2. Those which have been left uncompleted because our mental powers have failed us, i.e., unsolved problems.

3. Those which have been turned back and suppressed during the day. This is reinforced by a powerful fourth
group:

4. Those which have been excited in our Ucs during the day by the workings of the Pcs; and finally we may add a
fifth, consisting of:

5. The indifferent impressions of the day, which have therefore been left unsettled.

We need not underrate the psychic intensities introduced into sleep by these residues of the day's waking life,
especially those emanating from the group of the unsolved issues. It is certain that these excitations continue to
strive for expression during the night, and we may assume with equal certainty that the state of sleep renders
impossible the usual continuance of the process of excitation in the preconscious and its termination in becoming
conscious. In so far as we can become conscious of our mental processes in the ordinary way, even during the night, to
that extent we are simply not asleep. I cannot say what change is produced in the Pcs system by the state of sleep,
1 but there is no doubt that the psychological characteristics of sleep are to be sought mainly in the
cathectic changes occurring just in this system, which dominates, moreover, the approach to motility, paralysed during
sleep. On the other hand, I have found nothing in the psychology of dreams to warrant the assumption that sleep
produces any but secondary changes in the conditions of the Ucs system. Hence, for the nocturnal excitations in the Pcs
there remains no other path than that taken by the wish-excitations from the Ucs; they must seek reinforcement from the
Ucs, and follow the detours of the unconscious excitations. But what is the relation of the preconscious day-residues
to the dream? There is no doubt that they penetrate abundantly into the dream; that they utilize the dream-content to
obtrude themselves upon consciousness even during the night; indeed, they sometimes even dominate the dream-content,
and impel it to continue the work of the day; it is also certain that the day-residues may just as well have any other
character as that of wishes. But it is highly instructive, and for the theory of wish-fulfilment of quite decisive
importance, to see what conditions they must comply with in order to be received into the dream.

1 I have endeavoured to penetrate farther into the relations of the sleeping state and the
conditions of hallucination in my essay, "Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams," Collected Papers, IV,
p. 137.

Let us pick out one of the dreams cited above, e.g., the dream in which my friend Otto seems to show the symptoms of
Basedow's disease (chapter V., D). Otto's appearance gave me some concern during the day, and this worry, like
everything else relating to him, greatly affected me. I may assume that this concern followed me into sleep. I was
probably bent on finding out what was the matter with him. During the night my concern found expression in the dream
which I have recorded. Not only was its content senseless, but it failed to show any wish-fulfilment. But I began to
search for the source of this incongruous expression of the solicitude felt during the day, and analysis revealed a
connection. I identified my friend Otto with a certain Baron L and myself with a Professor R. There was only one
explanation of my being impelled to select just this substitute for the day — thought. I must always have been ready in
the Ucs to identify myself with Professor R, as this meant the realization of one of the immortal infantile wishes,
viz., the wish to become great. Repulsive ideas respecting my friend, ideas that would certainly have been repudiated
in a waking state, took advantage of the opportunity to creep into the dream; but the worry of the day had likewise
found some sort of expression by means of a substitute in the dream-content. The day-thought, which was in itself not a
wish, but on the contrary a worry, had in some way to find a connection with some infantile wish, now unconscious and
suppressed, which then allowed it — duly dressed up — to arise for consciousness. The more domineering the worry the
more forced could be the connection to be established; between the content of the wish and that of the worry there need
be no connection, nor was there one in our example.

It would perhaps be appropriate, in dealing with this problem, to inquire how a dream behaves when material is
offered to it in the dream-thoughts which flatly opposes a wish-fulfilment; such as justified worries, painful
reflections and distressing realizations. The many possible results may be classified as follows: (a) The dream-work
succeeds in replacing all painful ideas by contrary ideas. and suppressing the painful affect belonging to them. This,
then, results in a pure and simple satisfaction-dream, a palpable wish-fulfilment, concerning which there is nothing
more to be said. (b) The painful ideas find their way into the manifest dream-content, more or less modified, but
nevertheless quite recognizable. This is the case which raises doughts about the wish-theory of dreams, and thus calls
for further investigation. Such dreams with a painful content may either be indifferent in feeling, or they may convey
the whole painful affect, which the ideas contained in them seem to justify, or they may even lead to the development
of anxiety to the point of waking.

Analysis then shows that even these painful dreams are wish — fulfilments. An unconscious and repressed wish, whose
fulfilment could only be felt as painful by the dreamer's ego, has seized the opportunity offered by the continued
cathexis of painful day — residues, has lent them its support, and has thus made them capable of being dreamed. But
whereas in case (a) the unconscious wish coincided with the conscious one, in case (b) the discord between the
unconscious and the conscious — the repressed material and the ego — is revealed, and the situation in the fairy-tale,
of the three wishes which the fairy offers to the married couple, is realized (see p. 534 below). The gratification in
respect of the fulfilment of the repressed wish may prove to be so great that it balances the painful affects adhering
to the day-residues; the dream is then indifferent in its affective tone, although it is on the one hand the fulfilment
of a wish, and on the other the fulfilment of a fear. Or it may happen that the sleeper's ego plays an even more
extensive part in the dream-formation, that it reacts with violent resentment to the accomplished satisfaction of the
repressed wish, and even goes so far as to make an end of the dream by means of anxiety. It is thus not difficult to
recognize that dreams of pain and anxiety are, in accordance with our theory, just as much wish-fulfilments as are the
straightforward dreams of gratification.

Painful dreams may also be punishment dreams. It must be admitted that the recognition of these dreams adds
something that is, in a certain sense, new to the theory of dreams. What is fulfilled by them is once more an
unconscious wish — the wish for the punishment of the dreamer for a repressed, prohibited wish — impulse. To this
extent, these dreams comply with the requirement here laid down: that the motive-power behind the dream-formation must
be furnished by a wish belonging to the unconscious. But a finer psychological dissection allows us to recognize the
difference between this and the other wish-dreams. In the dreams of group (b) the unconscious dream-forming wish
belonged to the repressed material. In the punishment-dreams it is likewise an unconscious wish, but one which we must
attribute not to the repressed material but to the ego.

Punishment-dreams point, therefore, to the possibility of a still more extensive participation of the ego in
dream-formation. The mechanism of dream-formation becomes indeed in every way more transparent if in place of the
antithesis conscious and unconscious, we put the antithesis: ego and repressed. This, however, cannot be done without
taking into account what happens in the psychoneuroses, and for this reason it has not been done in this book. Here I
need only remark that the occurrence of punishment-dreams is not generally subject to the presence of painful
day-residues. They originate, indeed, most readily if the contrary is true, if the thoughts which are day-residues are
of a gratifying nature, but express illicit gratifications. Of these thoughts nothing, then, finds its way into the
manifest dream except their contrary, just as was the case in the dreams of group (a). Thus it would be the essential
characteristic of punishment-dreams that in them it is not the unconscious wish from the repressed material (from the
system Ucs) that is responsible for dream-formation but the punitive wish reacting against it, a wish pertaining to the
ego, even though it is unconscious (i.e., preconscious). 1

1 Here one may consider the idea of the super-ego which was later recognized by
psycho-analysis.

I will elucidate some of the foregoing observations by means of a dream of my own, and above all I will try to show
how the dream-work deals with a day-residue involving painful expectation:

Indistinct beginning. I tell my wife I have some news for her, something very special. She becomes frightened, and
does not wish to hear it. I assure her that on the contrary it is something which will please her greatly, and I begin
to tell her that our son's Officers' Corps has sent a sum of money (5,000 k.?) . . . something about
honourable mention . . . distribution . . . at the same time I have gone with her into a sitting
room, like a store-room, in order to fetch something from it. Suddenly I see my son appear; he is not in uniform but
rather in a tight-fitting sports suit (like a seal?) with a small cap. He climbs on to a basket which stands to one
side near a chest, in order to put something on this chest. I address him; no answer. It seems to me that his face or
forehead is bandaged, he arranges something in his mouth, pushing something into it. Also his hair shows a glint of
grey. I reflect: Can he be so exhausted? And has he false teeth? Before I can address him again I awake without
anxiety, but with palpitations. My clock points to 2.30 a.m.

To give a full analysis is once more impossible. I shall therefore confine myself to emphasizing some decisive
points. Painful expectations of the day had given occasion for this dream; once again there had been no news for over a
week from my son, who was fighting at the Front. It is easy to see that in the dream-content the conviction that he has
been killed or wounded finds expression. At the beginning of the dream one can observe an energetic effort to replace
the painful thoughts by their contrary. I have to impart something very pleasing, something about sending money,
honourable mention, and distribution. (The sum of money originates in a gratifying incident of my medical practice; it
is therefore trying to lead the dream away altogether from its theme.) But this effort fails. The boy's mother has a
presentiment of something terrible and does not wish to listen. The disguises are too thin; the reference to the
material to be suppressed shows through everywhere. If my son is killed, then his comrades will send back his property;
I shall have to distribute whatever he has left among his sisters, brothers and other people. Honourable mention is
frequently awarded to an officer after he has died the "hero's death." The dream thus strives to give direct expression
to what it at first wished to deny, whilst at the same time the wish-fulfilling tendency reveals itself by distortion.
(The change of locality in the dream is no doubt to be understood as threshold symbolism, in line with Silberer's
view.) We have indeed no idea what lends it the requisite motive-power. But my son does not appear as failing (on the
field of battle) but climbing. — He was, in fact, a daring mountaineer. — He is not in uniform, but in a sports suit;
that is, the place of the fatality now dreaded has been taken by an accident which happened to him at one time when he
was ski — running, when he fell and fractured his thigh. But the nature of his costume, which makes him look like a
seal, recalls immediately a younger person, our comical little grandson; the grey hair recalls his father, our
son-in-law, who has had a bad time in the War. What does this signify? But let us leave this: the locality, a pantry,
the chest, from which he wants to take something (in the dream, to put something on it), are unmistakable allusions to
an accident of my own, brought upon myself when I was between two and three years of age. I climbed on a foot-stool in
the pantry, in order to get something nice which was on a chest or table. The footstool tumbled over and its edge
struck me behind the lower jaw. I might very well have knocked all my teeth out. At this point, an admonition presents
itself: it serves you right — like a hostile impulse against the valiant warrior. A profounder analysis enables me to
detect the hidden impulse, which would be able to find satisfaction in the dreaded mishap to my son. It is the envy of
youth which the elderly man believes that he has thoroughly stifled in actual life. There is no mistaking the fact that
it was the very intensity of the painful apprehension lest such a misfortune should really happen that searched out for
its alleviation such a repressed wish-fulfilment.

I can now clearly define what the unconscious wish means for the dream. I will admit that there is a whole class of
dreams in which the incitement originates mainly or even exclusively from the residues of the day; and returning to the
dream about my friend Otto, I believe that even my desire to become at last a professor extraordinarius would have
allowed me to sleep in peace that night, had not the day's concern for my friend's health continued active. But this
worry alone would not have produced a dream; the motive-power needed by the dream had to be contributed by a wish, and
it was the business of my concern to find such a wish for itself, as the motive power of the dream. To put it
figuratively, it is quite possible that a day-thought plays the part of the entrepreneur in the dream; but the
entrepreneur, who, as we say, has the idea, and feels impelled to realize it, can do nothing without capital; he needs
a capitalist who will defray the expense, and this capitalist, who contributes the psychic expenditure for the dream,
is invariably and indisputably, whatever the nature of the waking thoughts, a wish from the unconscious.

In other cases the capitalist himself is the entrepreneur; this, indeed, seems to be the more usual case. An
unconscious wish is excited by the day's work, and this now creates the dream. And the dream-processes provide a
parallel for all the other possibilities of the economic relationship here used as an illustration. Thus the
entrepreneur may himself contribute a little of the capital, or several entrepreneurs may seek the aid of the same
capitalist, or several capitalists may jointly supply the capital required by the entrepreneurs. Thus there are dreams
sustained by more than one dream-wish, and many similar variations, which may be readily imagined, and which are of no
further interest to us. What is still lacking to our discussion of the dream-wish we shall only be able to complete
later on.

The tertium comparationis in the analogies here employed, the quantitative element of which an allotted amount is
placed at the free disposal of the dream, admits of a still closer application to the elucidation of the
dream-structure. As shown in chapter VI., B., we can recognize in most dreams a centre supplied with a special sensory
intensity. This is, as a rule, the direct representation of the wish-fulfilment; for, if we reverse the displacements
of the dream-work, we find that the psychic intensity of the elements in the dream-thoughts is replaced by the sensory
intensity of the elements in the dream-content. The elements in the neighbourhood of the wish-fulfilment have often
nothing to do with its meaning, but prove to be the offshoots of painful thoughts which are opposed to the wish. But
owing to their connection with the central element, often artificially established, they secure so large a share of its
intensity as to become capable of representation. Thus, the representative energy of the wish-fulfilment diffuses
itself over a certain sphere of association, within which all elements are raised to representation, including even
those that are in themselves without resources. In dreams containing several dynamic wishes we can easily separate and
delimit the spheres of the individual wish-fulfilments, and we shall find that the gaps in the dream are often of the
nature of boundary-zones.

Although the foregoing remarks have restricted the significance of the day-residues for the dream, they are none the
less deserving of some further attention. For they must be a necessary ingredient in dream-formation, inasmuch as
experience reveals the surprising fact that every dream shows in its content a connection with a recent waking
impression, often of the most indifferent kind. So far we have failed to understand the necessity for this addition to
the dream-mixture (chapter V., A.). This necessity becomes apparent only when we bear in mind the part played by the
unconscious wish, and seek further information in the psychology of the neuroses. We shall then learn that an
unconscious idea, as such, is quite incapable of entering into the preconscious, and that it can exert an influence
there only by establishing touch with a harmless idea already belonging to the preconscious, to which it transfers its
intensity, and by which it allows itself to be screened. This is the fact of transference, which furnishes the
explanation of so many surprising occurrences in the psychic life of neurotics. The transference may leave the idea
from the preconscious unaltered, though the latter will thus acquire an unmerited intensity, or it may force upon this
some modification derived from the content of the transferred idea. I trust the reader will pardon my fondness for
comparisons with daily life, but I feel tempted to say that the situation for the repressed idea is like that of the
American dentist in Austria, who may not carry on his practice unless he can get a duly installed doctor of medicine to
serve him as a signboard and legal "cover." Further, just as it is not exactly the busiest physicians who form such
alliances with dental practitioners, so in the psychic life the choice as regards covers for repressed ideas does not
fall upon such preconscious or conscious ideas as have themselves attracted enough of the attention active in the
preconscious. The unconscious prefers to entangle with its connections either those impressions and ideas of the
preconscious which have remained unnoticed as being indifferent or those which have immediately had attention withdrawn
from them again (by rejection). it is a well-known proposition of the theory of associations, confirmed by all
experience, that ideas which have formed a very intimate connection in one direction assume a negative type of attitude
towards whole groups of new connections. I have even attempted at one time to base a theory of hysterical paralysis on
this principle.

If we assume that the same need of transference on the part of the repressed ideas, of which we have become aware
through the analysis of the neurosis, makes itself felt in dreams also, we can at once explain two of the problems of
the dream: namely, that every dream-analysis reveals an interweaving of a recent impression, and that this recent
element is often of the most indifferent character. We may add what we have already learned elsewhere, that the reason
why these recent and indifferent elements so frequently find their way into the dream-content as substitutes for the
very oldest elements of the dream-thoughts is that they have the least to fear from the resisting censorship. But while
this freedom from censorship explains only the preference shown to the trivial elements, the constant presence of
recent elements points to the necessity for transference. Both groups of impressions satisfy the demand of the
repressed ideas for material still free from associations, the indifferent ones because they have offered no occasion
for extensive associations, and the recent ones because they have not had sufficient time to form such
associations.

We thus see that the day-residues, among which we may now include the indifferent impressions, not only borrow
something from the Ucs when they secure a share in dream-formation — namely, the motive-power at the disposal of the
repressed wish — but they also offer to the unconscious something that is indispensable to it, namely, the points of
attachment necessary for transference. If we wished to penetrate more deeply into the psychic processes, we should have
to throw a clearer light on the play of excitations between the preconscious and the unconscious, and indeed the study
of the psychoneuroses would impel us to do so; but dreams, as it happens, give us no help in this respect.

Just one further remark as to the day-residues. There is no doubt that it is really these that disturb our sleep,
and not our dreams which, on the contrary, strive to guard our sleep. But we shall return to this point later.

So far we have discussed the dream-wish; we have traced it back to the sphere of the Ucs, and have analysed its
relation to the day-residues, which, in their turn, may be either wishes, or psychic impulses of any other kind, or
simply recent impressions. We have thus found room for the claims that can be made for the dream-forming significance
of our waking mental activity in all its multifariousness. It might even prove possible to explain, on the basis of our
train of thought, those extreme cases in which the dream, continuing the work of the day, brings to a happy issue an
unsolved problem of waking life. We merely lack a suitable example to analyse, in order to uncover the infantile or
repressed source of wishes, the tapping of which has so successfully reinforced the efforts of the preconscious
activity. But we are not a step nearer to answering the question: Why is it that the unconscious can furnish in sleep
nothing more than the motive-power for a wish-fulfilment? The answer to this question must elucidate the psychic nature
of the state of wishing: and it will be given with the aid of the notion of the psychic apparatus.

We do not doubt that this apparatus, too, has only arrived at its present perfection by a long process of evolution.
Let us attempt to restore it as it existed in an earlier stage of capacity. From postulates to be confirmed in other
ways, we know that at first the apparatus strove to keep itself as free from stimulation as possible, and therefore, in
its early structure, adopted the arrangement of a reflex apparatus, which enabled it promptly to discharge by the motor
paths any sensory excitation reaching it from without. But this simple function was disturbed by the exigencies of
life, to which the apparatus owes the impetus toward further development. The exigencies of life first confronted it in
the form of the great physical needs. The excitation aroused by the inner need seeks an outlet in motility, which we
may describe as internal change or expression of the emotions. The hungry child cries or struggles helplessly. But its
situation remains unchanged; for the excitation proceeding from the inner need has not the character of a momentary
impact, but of a continuing pressure. A change can occur only if, in some way (in the case of the child by external
assistance), there is an experience of satisfaction, which puts an end to the internal excitation. An essential
constituent of this experience is the appearance of a certain percept (of food in our example), the memory-image of
which is henceforth associated with the memory — trace of the excitation arising from the need. Thanks to the
established connection, there results, at the next occurrence of this need, a psychic impulse which seeks to revive the
memory — image of the former percept, and to re-evoke the former percept itself; that is, it actually seeks to
re-establish the situation of the first satisfaction. Such an impulse is what we call a wish; the reappearance of the
perception constitutes the wish — fulfilment, and the full cathexis of the perception, by the excitation springing from
the need, constitutes the shortest path to the wish-fulfilment. We may assume a primitive state of the psychic
apparatus in which this path is actually followed, i.e., in which the wish ends in hallucination. This first psychic
activity therefore aims at an identity of perception: that is, at a repetition of that perception which is connected
with the satisfaction of the need.

This primitive mental activity must have been modified by bitter practical experience into a secondary and more
appropriate activity. The establishment of identity of perception by the short regressive path within the apparatus
does not produce the same result in another respect as follows upon cathexis of the same perception coming from
without. The satisfaction does not occur, and the need continues. In order to make the internal cathexis equivalent to
the external one, the former would have to be continuously sustained, just as actually happens in the hallucinatory
psychoses and in hunger-phantasies, which exhaust their performance in maintaining their hold on the object desired. In
order to attain to more appropriate use of the psychic energy, it becomes necessary to suspend the full regression, so
that it does not proceed beyond the memory-image, and thence can seek other paths, leading ultimately to the production
of the desired identity from the side of the outer world. 1 This inhibition, as well as the subsequent
deflection of the excitation, becomes the task of a second system, which controls voluntary motility, i.e., a system
whose activity first leads on to the use of motility for purposes remembered in advance. But all this complicated
mental activity, which works its way from the memory-image to the production of identity of perception via the outer
world, merely represents a roundabout way to wish-fulfilment made necessary by experience. 2 Thinking is
indeed nothing but a substitute for the hallucinatory wish; and if the dream is called a wish-fulfilment, this becomes
something self-evident, since nothing but a wish can impel our psychic apparatus to activity. The dream, which fulfils
its wishes by following the short regressive path, has thereby simply preserved for us a specimen of the primary method
of operation of the psychic apparatus, which has been abandoned as inappropriate. What once prevailed in the waking
state, when our psychic life was still young and inefficient, seems to have been banished into our nocturnal life; just
as we still find in the nursery those discarded primitive weapons of adult humanity, the bow and arrow. Dreaming is a
fragment of the superseded psychic life of the child. In the psychoses, those modes of operation of the psychic
apparatus which are normally suppressed in the waking state reassert themselves, and thereupon betray their inability
to satisfy our demands in the outer world. 3

1 In other words: the introduction of a test of reality is recognized as necessary.

3 I have further elaborated this train of thought elsewhere, where I have distinguished the
two principles involved as the pleasure-principle and the reality-principle. Formulations regarding the Two Principles
in Mental Functioning, in Collected Papers, Vol. iv. p. 13.

The unconscious wish-impulses evidently strive to assert themselves even during the day, and the fact of
transference, as well as the psychoses, tells us that they endeavour to force their way through the preconscious system
to consciousness and the command of motility. Thus, in the censorship between Ucs and Pcs, which the dream forces us to
assume, we must recognize and respect the guardian of our psychic health. But is it not carelessness on the part of
this guardian to diminish his vigilance at night, and to allow the suppressed impulses of the Ucs to achieve
expression, thus again making possible the process of hallucinatory regression? I think not, for when the critical
guardian goes to rest — and we have proof that his slumber is not profound — he takes care to close the gate to
motility. No matter what impulses from the usually inhibited Ucs may bustle about the stage, there is no need to
interfere with them; they remain harmless, because they are not in a position to set in motion the motor apparatus
which alone can operate to produce any change in the outer world. Sleep guarantees the security of the fortress which
has to be guarded. The state of affairs is less harmless when a displacement of energies is produced, not by the
decline at night in the energy put forth by the critical censorship, but by the pathological enfeeblement of the
latter, or the pathological reinforcement of the unconscious excitations, and this while the preconscious is cathected
and the gates of motility are open. The guardian is then overpowered; the unconscious excitations subdue the Pcs, and
from the Pcs they dominate our speech and action, or they enforce hallucinatory regressions, thus directing an
apparatus not designed for them by virtue of the attraction exerted by perceptions on the distribution of our psychic
energy. We call this condition psychosis.

We now find ourselves in the most favourable position for continuing the construction of our psychological
scaffolding, which we left after inserting the two systems, Ucs and Pcs. However, we still have reason to give further
consideration to the wish as the sole psychic motive-power in the dream. We have accepted the explanation that the
reason why the dream is in every case a wish-fulfilment is that it is a function of the system Ucs, which knows no
other aim than wish-fulfilment, and which has at its disposal no forces other than the wish-impulses. Now if we want to
continue for a single moment longer to maintain our right to develop such far-reaching psychological speculations from
the facts of dream-interpretation, we are in duty bound to show that they insert the dream into a context which can
also embrace other psychic structures. If there exists a system of the Ucs — or something sufficiently analogous for
the purposes of our discussion — the dream cannot be its sole manifestation; every dream may be a wish-fulfilment, but
there must be other forms of abnormal wish-fulfilment as well as dreams. And in fact the theory of all psychoneurotic
symptoms culminates in the one proposition that they, too, must be conceived as wish-fulfilments of the unconscious.
1 Our explanation makes the dream only the first member of a series of the greatest importance for the
psychiatrist, the understanding of which means the solution of the purely psychological part of the psychiatric
problem. 2 But in other members of this group of wish-fulfilments — for example, in the hysterical symptoms
— I know of one essential characteristic which I have so far failed to find in the dream. Thus, from the investigations
often alluded to in this treatise, I know that the formation of an hysterical symptom needs a junction of both the
currents of our psychic life. The symptom is not merely the expression of a realized unconscious wish; the latter must
be joined by another wish from the preconscious, which is fulfilled by the same symptom; so that the symptom is at
least doubly determined, once by each of the conflicting systems. Just as in dreams, there is no limit to further over
— determination. The determination which does not derive from the Ucs is, as far as I can see, invariably a
thought-stream of reaction against the unconscious wish; for example, a self — punishment. Hence I can say, quite
generally, that an hysterical symptom originates only where two contrary wish-fulfilments, having their source in
different psychic systems, are able to meet in a single expression. 3 Examples would help us but little
here, as nothing but a complete unveiling of the complications in question can carry conviction. I will therefore
content myself with the bare assertion, and will cite one example, not because it proves anything, but simply as an
illustration. The hysterical vomiting of a female patient proved, on the one hand, to be the fulfilment of an
unconscious phantasy from the years of puberty — namely, the wish that she might be continually pregnant, and have a
multitude of children; and this was subsequently supplemented by the wish that she might have them by as many fathers
as possible. Against this immoderate wish there arose a powerful defensive reaction. But as by the vomiting the patient
might have spoilt her figure and her beauty, so that she would no longer find favour in any man's eyes, the symptom was
also in keeping with the punitive trend of thought, and so, being admissible on both sides, it was allowed to become a
reality. This is the same way of acceding to a wish-fulfilment as the queen of the Parthians was pleased to adopt in
the case of the triumvir Crassus. Believing that he had undertaken his campaign out of greed for gold, she caused
molten gold to be poured into the throat of the corpse. "Here thou hast what thou hast longed for!"

1 Expressed more exactly: One portion of the symptom corresponds to the unconscious
wish-fulfilment, while the other corresponds to the reaction-formation opposed to it.

2 Hughlings Jackson has expressed himself as follows: "Find out all about dreams, and you
will have found out all about insanity."

Of the dream we know as yet only that it expresses a wish — fulfilment of the unconscious; and apparently the
dominant preconscious system permits this fulfilment when it has compelled the wish to undergo certain distortions. We
are, moreover, not in fact in a position to demonstrate regularly the presence of a train of thought opposed to the
dream-wish, which is realized in the dream as well as its antagonist. Only now and then have we found in dream-analyses
signs of reaction-products as, for instance, my affection for my friend R in the dream of my uncle (chapter IV.). But
the contribution from the preconscious which is missing here may be found in another place. The dream can provide
expression for a wish from the Ucs by means of all sorts of distortions, once the dominant system has withdrawn itself
into the wish to sleep, and has realized this wish by producing the changes of cathexis within the psychic apparatus
which are within its power; thereupon holding on to the wish in question for the whole duration of sleep.
1

1 This idea has been borrowed from the theory of sleep of Liebault, who revived hypnotic
research in modern times (Du Sommeil provoque, etc., Paris [1889]).

Now this persistent wish to sleep on the part of the preconscious has a quite general facilitating effect on the
formation of dreams. Let us recall the dream of the father who, by the gleam of light from the death-chamber, was led
to conclude that his child's body might have caught fire. We have shown that one of the psychic forces decisive in
causing the father to draw this conclusion in the dream instead of allowing himself to be awakened by the gleam of
light was the wish to prolong the life of the child seen in the dream by one moment. Other wishes originating in the
repressed have probably escaped us, for we are unable to analyse this dream. But as a second source of motive — power
in this dream we may add the father's desire to sleep, for, like the life of the child, the father's sleep is prolonged
for a moment by the dream. The underlying motive is: "Let the dream go on, or I must wake up." As in this dream, so in
all others, the wish to sleep lends its support to the unconscious wish. In chapter III. we cited dreams which were
manifestly dreams of convenience. But in truth all dreams may claim this designation. The efficacy of the wish to go on
sleeping is most easily recognized in the awakening dreams, which so elaborate the external sensory stimulus that it
becomes compatible with the continuance of sleep; they weave it into a dream in order to rob it of any claims it might
make as a reminder of the outer world. But this wish to go on sleeping must also play its part in permitting all other
dreams, which can only act as disturbers of the state of sleep from within. "Don't worry; sleep on; it's only a dream,"
is in many cases the suggestion of the Pcs to consciousness when the dream gets too bad; and this describes in a quite
general way the attitude of our dominant psychic activity towards dreaming, even though the thought remains unuttered.
I must draw the conclusion that throughout the whole of our sleep we are just as certain that we are dreaming as we are
certain that we are sleeping. It is imperative to disregard the objection that our consciousness is never directed to
the latter knowledge, and that it is directed to the former knowledge only on special occasions, when the censorship
feels, as it were, taken by surprise. On the contrary, there are persons in whom the retention at night of the
knowledge that they are sleeping and dreaming becomes quite manifest, and who are thus apparently endowed with the
conscious faculty of guiding their dream-life. Such a dreamer, for example, is dissatisfied with the turn taken by a
dream; he breaks it off without waking, and begins it afresh, in order to continue it along different lines, just like
a popular author who, upon request, gives a happier ending to his play. Or on another occasion, when the dream places
him in a sexually exciting situation, he thinks in his sleep: "I don't want to continue this dream and exhaust myself
by an emission; I would rather save it for a real situation."

The Marquis Hervey (Vaschide) declared that he had gained such power over his dreams that he could accelerate their
course at will, and turn them in any direction he wished. It seems that in him the wish to sleep had accorded a place
to another, a preconscious wish, the wish to observe his dreams and to derive pleasure from them. Sleep is just as
compatible with such a wish — resolve as it is with some proviso as a condition of waking up (wet-nurse's sleep), We
know, too, that in all persons an interest in dreams greatly increases the number of dreams remembered after
waking.

Concerning other observations as to the guidance of dreams, Ferenczi states: "The dream takes the thought that
happens to occupy our psychic life at the moment, and elaborates it from all sides. It lets any given dream-picture
drop when there is a danger that the wish-fulfilment will miscarry, and attempts a new kind of solution, until it
finally succeeds in creating a wish — fulfilment that satisfies in one compromise both instances of the psychic
life."

Now that we know that throughout the night the preconscious is orientated to the wish to sleep, we can follow the
dream-process with proper understanding. But let us first summarize what we already know about this process. We have
seen that day-residues are left over from the waking activity of the mind, residues from which it has not been possible
to withdraw all cathexis. Either one of the unconscious wishes has been aroused through the waking activity during the
day or it so happens that the two coincide; we have already discussed the multifarious possibilities. Either already
during the day or only on the establishment of the state of sleep the unconscious wish has made its way to the day-
residues, and has effected a transference to them. Thus there arises a wish transferred to recent material; or the
suppressed recent wish is revived by a reinforcement from the unconscious. This wish now endeavours to make its way to
consciousness along the normal path of the thought processes, through the preconscious, to which indeed it belongs by
virtue of one of its constituent elements. It is, however, confronted by the censorship which still subsists, and to
whose influence it soon succumbs. It now takes on the distortion for which the way has already been paved by the
transference to recent material. So far it is on the way to becoming something resembling an obsession, a delusion, or
the like, i.e., a thought reinforced by a transference, and distorted in expression owing to the censorship. But its
further progress is now checked by the state of sleep of the preconscious; this system has presumably protected itself
against invasion by diminishing its excitations. The dream-process, therefore, takes the regressive course, which is
just opened up by the peculiarity of the sleeping state, and in so doing follows the attraction exerted on it by memory
— groups, which are, in part only, themselves present as visual cathexis, not as translations into the symbols of the
later systems. On its way to regression it acquires representability. The subject of compression will be discussed
later. The dream-process has by this time covered the second part of its contorted course. The first part threads its
way progressively from the unconscious scenes or phantasies to the preconscious, while the second part struggles back
from the boundary of the censorship to the tract of the perceptions. But when the dream-process becomes a
perception-content, it has, so to speak, eluded the obstacle set up in the Pcs by the censorship and the sleeping
state. It succeeds in drawing attention to itself, and in being remarked by consciousness. For consciousness, which for
us means a sense — organ for the apprehension of psychic qualities, can be excited in waking life from two sources:
firstly, from the periphery of the whole apparatus, the perceptive system; and secondly, from the excitations of
pleasure and pain which emerge as the sole psychic qualities yielded by the transpositions of energy in the interior of
the apparatus. All other processes in the Psi — systems, even those in the preconscious, are devoid of all psychic
quality, and are therefore not objects of consciousness, inasmuch as they do not provide either pleasure or pain for
its perception. We shall have to assume that these releases of pleasure and pain automatically regulate the course of
the cathectic processes. But in order to make possible more delicate performances, it subsequently proved necessary to
render the flow of ideas more independent of pain-signals. To accomplish this, the Pcs system needed qualities of its
own which could attract consciousness, and most probably received them through the connection of the preconscious
processes with the memory-system of speech-symbols, which was not devoid of quality. Through the qualities of this
system, consciousness, hitherto only a sense — organ for perceptions, now becomes also a sense-organ for a part of our
thought-processes. There are now, as it were, two sensory surfaces, one turned toward perception and the other toward
the preconscious thought-processes.

I must assume that the sensory surface of consciousness which is turned to the preconscious is rendered far more
unexcitable by sleep than the surface turned toward the P-system. The giving up of interest in the nocturnal
thought-process is, of course, an appropriate procedure. Nothing is to happen in thought; the preconscious wants to
sleep. But once the dream becomes perception, it is capable of exciting consciousness through the qualities now gained.
The sensory excitation performs what is in fact its function; namely, it directs a part of the cathectic energy
available in the Pcs to the exciting cause in the form of attention. We must therefore admit that the dream always has
a waking effect — that is, it calls into activity part of the quiescent energy of the Pcs. Under the influence of this
energy, it now undergoes the process which we have described as secondary elaboration with a view to coherence and
comprehensibility. This means that the dream is treated by this energy like any other perception-content; it is
subjected to the same anticipatory ideas as far, at least, as the material allows. As far as this third part of the
dream-process has any direction, this is once more progressive.

To avoid misunderstanding, it will not be amiss to say a few words as to the temporal characteristics of these
dream-processes. In a very interesting discussion, evidently suggested by Maury's puzzling guillotine dream, Goblot
tries to demonstrate that a dream takes up no other time than the transition period between sleeping and waking. The
process of waking up requires time; during this time the dream occurs. It is supposed that the final picture of the
dream is so vivid that it forces the dreamer to wake; in reality it is so vivid only because when it appears the
dreamer is already very near waking. "Un reve, c'est un reveil qui commence." 1

1 A dream is the beginning of wakening.

It has already been pointed out by Dugas that Goblot, in order to generalize his theory, was forced to ignore a
great many facts. There are also dreams from which we do not awaken; for example, many dreams in which we dream that we
dream. From our knowledge of the dream-work, we can by no means admit that it extends only over the period of waking.
On the contrary, we must consider it probable that the first part of the dream-work is already begun during the day,
when we are still under the domination of the preconscious. The second phase of the dream-work, viz., the alteration by
the censorship, the attraction exercised by unconscious scenes, and the penetration to perception, continues probably
all through the night, and accordingly we may always be correct when we report a feeling that we have been dreaming all
night, even although we cannot say what we have dreamed. I do not however, think that it is necessary to assume that up
to the time of becoming conscious the dream-processes really follow the temporal sequence which we have described;
viz., that there is first the transferred dream-wish, then the process of distortion due to the censorship, and then
the change of direction to regression, etc. We were obliged to construct such a sequence for the sake of description;
in reality, however, it is probably rather a question of simultaneously trying this path and that, and of the
excitation fluctuating to and fro, until finally, because it has attained the most apposite concentration, one
particular grouping remains in the field. Certain personal experiences even incline me to believe that the dream-work
often requires more than one day and one night to produce its result, in which case the extraordinary art manifested in
the construction of the dream is shorn of its miraculous character. In my opinion, even the regard for the
comprehensibility of the dream as a perceptual event may exert its influence before the dream attracts consciousness to
itself. From this point, however, the process is accelerated, since the dream is henceforth subjected to the same
treatment as any other perception. It is like fire works, which require hours for their preparation and then flare up
in a moment.

Through the dream-work, the dream-process now either gains sufficient intensity to attract consciousness to itself
and to arouse the preconscious (quite independently of the time or profundity of sleep), or its intensity is
insufficient, and it must wait in readiness until attion, becoming more alert immediately before waking, meets it
half-way. Most dreams seem to operate with relatively slight psychic intensities, for they wait for the process of
waking. This, then, explains the fact that as a rule we perceive something dreamed if we are suddenly roused from a
deep sleep. Here, as well as in spontaneous waking, our first glance lights upon the perception-content created by the
dream-work, while the next falls on that provided by the outer world.

But of greater theoretical interest are those dreams which are capable of waking us in the midst of our sleep. We
may bear in mind the purposefulness which can be demonstrated in all other cases, and ask ourselves why the dream, that
is, the unconscious wish, is granted the power to disturb our sleep, i.e., the fulfilment of the preconscious wish. The
explanation is probably to be found in certain relations of energy which we do not yet understand. If we did so, we
should probably find that the freedom given to the dream and the expenditure upon it of a certain detached attention
represent a saving of energy as against the alternative case of the unconscious having to be held in check at night
just as it is during the day. As experience shows, dreaming, even if it interrupts our sleep several times a night,
still remains compatible with sleep. We wake up for a moment, and immediately fall asleep again. It is like driving off
a fly in our sleep; we awake ad hoc. When we fall asleep again we have removed the cause of disturbance. The familiar
examples of the sleep of wet-nurses, etc., show that the fulfilment of the wish to sleep is quite compatible with the
maintenance of a certain amount of attention in a given direction.

But we must here take note of an objection which is based on a greater knowledge of the unconscious processes. We
have ourselves described the unconscious wishes as always active, whilst nevertheless asserting that in the daytime
they are not strong enough to make themselves perceptible. But when the state of sleep supervenes, and the unconscious
wish has shown its power to form a dream, and with it to awaken the preconscious, why does this power lapse after
cognizance has been taken of the dream? Would it not seem more probable that the dream should continually renew itself,
like the disturbing fly which, when driven away, takes pleasure in returning again and again? What justification have
we for our assertion that the dream removes the disturbance to sleep?

It is quite true that the unconscious wishes are always active. They represent paths which are always practicable,
whenever a quantum of excitation makes use of them. It is indeed an outstanding peculiarity of the unconscious
processes that they are indestructible. Nothing can be brought to an end in the unconscious; nothing is past or
forgotten. This is impressed upon us emphatically in the study of the neuroses, and especially of hysteria. The
unconscious path of thought which leads to the discharge through an attack is forthwith passable again when there is a
sufficient accumulation of excitation. The mortification suffered thirty years ago operates, after having gained access
to the unconscious sources of affect, during all these thirty years as though it were a recent experience. Whenever its
memory is touched, it revives, and shows itself to be cathected with excitation which procures a motor discharge for
itself in an attack. It is precisely here that psychotherapy must intervene, its task being to ensure that the
unconscious processes are settled and forgotten. Indeed, the fading of memories and the weak affect of impressions
which are no longer recent, which we are apt to take as self-evident, and to explain as a primary effect of time on our
psychic memory-residues, are in reality secondary changes brought about by laborious work. It is the preconscious that
accomplishes this work; and the only course which psychotherapy can pursue is to bring the Ucs under the dominion of
the Pcs.

There are, therefore, two possible issues for any single unconscious excitation-process. Either it is left to
itself, in which case it ultimately breaks through somewhere and secures, on this one occasion, a discharge for its
excitation into motility, or it succumbs to the influence of the preconscious, and through this its excitation becomes
bound instead of being discharged. It is the latter case that occurs in the dream-process. The cathexis from the Pcs
which goes to meet the dream once this has attained to perception, because it has been drawn thither by the excitation
of consciousness, binds the unconscious excitation of the dream and renders it harmless as a disturber of sleep. When
the dreamer wakes up for a moment, he has really chased away the fly that threatened to disturb his sleep. We may now
begin to suspect that it is really more expedient and economical to give way to the unconscious wish, to leave clear
its path to regression so that and it may form a dream, and then to bind and dispose of this dream by means of a small
outlay of preconscious work, than to hold the unconscious in check throughout the whole period of sleep. It was,
indeed, to be expected that the dream, even if originally it was not a purposeful process, would have seized upon some
definite function in the play of forces of the psychic life. We now see what this function is. The dream has taken over
the task of bringing the excitation of the Ucs, which had been left free, back under the domination of the
preconscious; it thus discharges the excitation of the Ucs, acts as a safety-valve for the latter, and at the same
time, by a slight outlay of waking activity, secures the sleep of the preconscious. Thus, like the other psychic
formations of its group, the dream offers itself as a compromise, serving both systems simultaneously, by fulfilling
the wishes of both, in so far as they are mutually compatible. A glance at Robert's "elimination theory" will show that
we must agree with this author on his main point, namely, the determination of the function of dreams, though we differ
from him in our general presuppositions and in our estimation of the dream-process. 1

1 Is this the only function which we can attribute to dreams? I know of no other. A. Maeder,
to be sure, has endeavoured to claim for the dream yet other secondary functions. He started from the just observation
that many dreams contain attempts to provide solutions of conflicts, which are afterwards actually carried through.
They thus behave like preparatory practice for waking activities. He therefore drew a parallel between dreaming and the
play of animals and children, which is to be conceived as a training of the inherited instincts, and a preparation for
their later serious activity, thus setting up a fonction ludique for the dream. A little while before Maeder, Alfred
Adler likewise emphasized the function of thinking ahead in the dream. (An analysis which I published in 1905 contained
a dream which may be conceived as a resolution-dream, which was repeated night after night until it was realized.)

But an obvious reflection must show us that this secondary function of the dream has no claim to recognition within
the framework of any dream-interpretation. Thinking ahead, making resolutions, sketching out attempted solutions which
can then perhaps be realized in waking life — these and many more performances are functions of the unconscious and
preconscious activities of the mind which continue as day-residues in the sleeping state, and can then combine with an
unconscious wish to form a dream (chapter VII., C.). The function of thinking ahead in the dream is thus rather a
function of preconscious waking thought, the result of which may be disclosed to us by the analysis of dreams or other
phenomena. After the dream has so long been fused with its manifest content, one must now guard against confusing it
with the latent dream-thoughts.

The above qualification — in so far as the two wishes are mutually compatible — contains a suggestion that there may
be cases in which the function of the dream fails. The dream-process is, to begin with, admitted as a wish-fulfilment
of the unconscious, but if this attempted wish-fulfilment disturbs the preconscious so profoundly that the latter can
no longer maintain its state of rest, the dream has broken the compromise, and has failed to perform the second part of
its task. It is then at once broken off, and replaced by complete awakening. But even here it is not really the fault
of the dream if, though at other times the guardian, it has now to appear as the disturber of sleep, nor need this
prejudice us against its averred purposive character. This is not the only instance in the organism in which a
contrivance that is usually to the purpose becomes inappropriate and disturbing so soon as something is altered in the
conditions which engender it; the disturbance, then, at all events serves the new purpose of indicating the change, and
of bringing into play against it the means of adjustment of the organism. Here, of course, I am thinking of the
anxiety-dream, and lest it should seem that I try to evade this witness against the theory of wish — fulfilment
whenever I encounter it, I will at least give some indications as to the explanation of the anxiety-dream.

That a psychic process which develops anxiety may still be a wish — fulfilment has long ceased to imply any
contradiction for us. We may explain this occurrence by the fact that the wish belongs to one system (the Ucs), whereas
the other system (the Pcs) has rejected and suppressed it. 1 The subjection of the Ucs by the Pcs is not
thoroughgoing even in perfect psychic health; the extent of this suppression indicates the degree of our psychic
normality. Neurotic symptoms indicate to us that the two systems are in mutual conflict; the symptoms are the result of
a compromise in this conflict, and they temporarily put an end to it. On the one hand, they afford the Ucs a way out
for the discharge of its excitation — they serve it as a kind of sally — gate — while, on the other hand, they give the
Pcs the possibility of dominating the Ucs in some degree. It is instructive to consider, for example, the significance
of a hysterical phobia, or of agoraphobia. A neurotic is said to be incapable of crossing the street alone, and this we
should rightly call a symptom. Let someone now remove this symptom by constraining him to this action which he deems
himself incapable of performing. The result will be an attack of anxiety, just as an attack of anxiety in the street
has often been the exciting cause of the establishment of an agoraphobia. We thus learn that the symptom has been
constituted in order to prevent the anxiety from breaking out. The phobia is thrown up before the anxiety like a
frontier fortress.

1 General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis, p. 534 below.

We cannot enlarge further on this subject unless we examine the role of the affects in these processes, which can
only be done here imperfectly. We will therefore affirm the proposition that the principal reason why the suppression
of the Ucs becomes necessary is that, if the movement of ideas in the Ucs were allowed to run its course, it would
develop an affect which originally had the character of pleasure, but which, since the process of repression, bears the
character of pain. The aim, as well as the result, of the suppression is to prevent the development of this pain. The
suppression extends to the idea — content of the Ucs, because the liberation of pain might emanate from this
idea-content. We here take as our basis a quite definite assumption as to the nature of the development of affect. This
is regarded as a motor or secretory function, the key to the innervation of which is to be found in the ideas of the
Ucs. Through the domination of the Pcs these ideas are as it were strangled, that is, inhibited from sending out the
impulse that would develop the affect. The danger which arises, if cathexis by the Pcs ceases, thus consists in the
fact that the unconscious excitations would liberate an affect that — in consequence of the repression that has
previously occurred — could only be felt as pain or anxiety.

This danger is released if the dream-process is allowed to have its own way. The conditions for its realization are
that repressions shall have occurred, and that the suppressed wish — impulses can become sufficiently strong. They,
therefore, fall entirely outside the psychological framework of dream-formation. Were it not for the fact that our
theme is connected by just one factor with the theme of the development of anxiety, namely, by the setting free of the
Ucs during sleep, I could refrain from the discussion of the anxiety-dream altogether, and thus avoid all the
obscurities involved in it.

The theory of the anxiety-dream belongs, as I have already repeatedly stated, to the psychology of the neuroses. I
might further add that anxiety in dreams is an anxiety-problem and not a dream-problem. Having once exhibited the point
of contact of the psychology of the neuroses with the theme of the dream-process, we have nothing further to do with
it. There is only one thing left which I can do. Since I have asserted that neurotic anxiety has its origin in sexual
sources, I can subject anxiety — dreams to analysis in order to demonstrate the sexual material in their
dream-thoughts.

For good reasons, I refrain from citing any of the examples so abundantly placed at my disposal by neurotic
patients, and prefer to give some anxiety-dreams of children.

Personally, I have had no real anxiety-dream for decades, but I do recall one from my seventh or eighth year which I
subjected to interpretation some thirty years later. The dream was very vivid, and showed me my beloved mother, with a
peculiarly calm, sleeping countenance, carried into the room and laid on the bed by two (or three) persons with birds'
beaks. I awoke crying and screaming, and disturbed my parents' sleep. The peculiarly draped, excessively tall figures
with beaks I had taken from the illustrations of Philippson's Bible; I believe they represented deities with the heads
of sparrowhawks from an Egyptian tomb — relief. The analysis yielded, however, also the recollection of a
house-porter's boy, who used to play with us children on a meadow in front of the house; I might add that his name was
Philip. It seemed to me then that I first heard from this boy the vulgar word signifying sexual intercourse, which is
replaced among educated persons by the Latin word coitus, but which the dream plainly enough indicates by the choice of
the birds' heads. I must have guessed the sexual significance of the word from the look of my worldly-wise teacher. My
mother's expression in the dream was copied from the countenance of my grandfather, whom I had seen a few days before
his death snoring in a state of coma. The interpretation of the secondary elaboration in the dream must therefore have
been that my mother was dying; the tomb-relief, too, agrees with this. I awoke with this anxiety, and could not calm
myself until I had waked my parents. I remember that I suddenly became calm when I saw my mother; it was as though I
had needed the assurance: then she was not dead. But this secondary interpretation of the dream had only taken place
when the influence of the developed anxiety was already at work. I was not in a state of anxiety because I had dreamt
that my mother was dying; I interpreted the dream in this manner in the preconscious elaboration because I was already
under the domination of the anxiety. The latter, however, could be traced back, through the repression to a dark,
plainly sexual craving, which had found appropriate expression in the visual content of the dream.

A man twenty-seven years of age, who had been seriously ill for a year, had repeatedly dreamed, between the ages of
eleven and thirteen, dreams attended with great anxiety, to the effect that a man with a hatchet was running after him;
he wanted to run away, but seemed to be paralysed, and could not move from the spot. This may be taken as a good and
typical example of a very common anxiety-dream, free from any suspicion of a sexual meaning. In the analysis, the
dreamer first thought of a story told him by his uncle (chronologically later than the dream), viz., that he was
attacked at night in the street by a suspicious — looking individual; and he concluded from this association that he
might have heard of a similar episode at the time of the dream. In association with the hatchet, he recalled that
during this period of his life he once hurt his hand with a hatchet while chopping wood. This immediately reminded him
of his relations with his younger brother, whom he used to maltreat and knock down. He recalled, in particular, one
occasion when he hit his brother's head with his boot and made it bleed, and his mother said: "I'm afraid he will kill
him one day." While he seemed to be thus held by the theme of violence, a memory from his ninth year suddenly emerged.
His parents had come home late and had gone to bed, whilst he was pretending to be asleep. He soon heard panting, and
other sounds that seemed to him mysterious, and he could also guess the position of his parents in bed. His further
thoughts showed that he had established an analogy between this relation between his parents and his own relation to
his younger brother. He subsumed what was happening between his parents under the notion of "an act of violence and a
fight." The fact that he had frequently noticed blood in his mother's bed corroborated this conception.

That the sexual intercourse of adults appears strange and alarming to children who observe it, and arouses anxiety
in them, is, I may say, a fact established by everyday experience. I have explained this anxiety on the ground that we
have here a sexual excitation which is not mastered by the child's understanding, and which probably also encounters
repulsion because their parents are involved, and is therefore transformed into anxiety. At a still earlier period of
life the sexual impulse towards the parent of opposite sex does not yet suffer repression, but as we have seen (chapter
V., D.) expresses itself freely.

For the night terrors with hallucinations (pavor nocturnus) so frequent in children I should without hesitation
offer the same explanation. These, too, can only be due to misunderstood and rejected sexual impulses which, if
recorded, would probably show a temporal periodicity, since an intensification of sexual libido may equally be produced
by accidentally exciting impressions and by spontaneous periodic processes of development.

I have not the necessary observational material for the full demonstration of this explanation. 1 On the
other hand, pediatrists seem to lack the point of view which alone makes intelligible the whole series of phenomena,
both from the somatic and from the psychic side. To illustrate by a comical example how closely, if one is made blind
by the blinkers of medical mythology, one may pass by the understanding of such cases, I will cite a case which I found
in a thesis on pavor nocturnus (Debacker, 1881, p. 66).

1 This material has since been provided in abundance by the literature of
psycho-analysis.

A boy of thirteen, in delicate health, began to be anxious and dreamy; his sleep became uneasy, and once almost
every week it was interrupted by an acute attack of anxiety with hallucinations. The memory of these dreams was always
very distinct. Thus he was able to relate that the devil had shouted at him: "Now we have you, now we have you!" and
then there was a smell of pitch and brimstone, and the fire burned his skin. From this dream he woke in terror; at
first he could not cry out; then his voice came back to him, and he was distinctly heard to say: "No, no, not me; I
haven't done anything," or: "Please, don't; I will never do it again!" At other times he said: "Albert has never done
that!" Later he avoided undressing, "because the fire attacked him only when he was undressed." In the midst of these
evil dreams, which were endangering his health, he was sent into the country, where he recovered in the course of
eighteen months. At the age of fifteen he confessed one day: "Je n'osais pas l'avouer, mais j'eprouvais continuellement
des picotements et des surexcitations aux parties; 1 a la fin, cela m'enervait tant que plusieurs fois j'ai
pense me jeter par la fenetre du dortoir." 2

1 The emphasis [on 'parties'] is my own, though the meaning is plain enough without it.

2 I did not dare admit it, but I continually felt tinglings and overexcitements of the
parts; at the end, it wearied me so much that several times I thought to throw myself from the dormitory window.

It is, of course, not difficult to guess: 1. That the boy had practised masturbation in former years, that he had
probably denied it, and was threatened with severe punishment for his bad habit (His confession: Je ne le ferai plus;
1 his denial: Albert n'a jamais fait ca.) 2 2. That, under the advancing pressure of puberty, the
temptation to masturbate was re-awakened through the titillation of the genitals. 3. That now, however, there arose
within him a struggle for repression, which suppressed the libido and transformed it into anxiety, and that this
anxiety now gathered up the punishments with which he was originally threatened.

1 I will not do it again.

2 Albert never did that.

Let us, on the other hand, see what conclusions were drawn by the author (p. 69):

"1. It is clear from this observation that the influence of puberty may produce in a boy of delicate health a
condition of extreme weakness, and that this may lead to a very marked cerebral anaemia. 1

1 The italics ['very marked cerebral anaemia.'] are mine.

"2. This cerebral anaemia produces an alteration of character, demono-maniacal hallucinations, and very violent
nocturnal, and perhaps also diurnal, states of anxiety.

"3. The demonomania and the self-reproaches of the boy can be traced to the influences of a religious education
which had acted upon him as a child.

"4. All manifestations disappeared as a result of a lengthy sojourn in the country, bodily exercise, and the return
of physical strength after the termination of puberty.

"5. Possibly an influence predisposing to the development of the boy's cerebral state may be attributed to heredity
and to the father's former syphilis."

1 We put this case in the file of apyretic delirias of inanition, for it is to cerebral
anaemia that we attach this particular state.

E. The Primary and Secondary Processes. Repression

In attempting to penetrate more profoundly into the psychology of the dream-processes, I have undertaken a difficult
task, to which, indeed, my powers of exposition are hardly adequate. To reproduce the simultaneity of so complicated a
scheme in terms of a successive description, and at the same time to make each part appear free from all assumptions,
goes fairly beyond my powers. I have now to atone for the fact that in my exposition of the psychology of dreams I have
been unable to follow the historic development of my own insight. The lines of approach to the comprehension of the
dream were laid down for me by previous investigations into the psychology of the neuroses, to which I should not refer
here, although I am constantly obliged to do so; whereas I should like to work in the opposite direction, starting from
the dream, and then proceeding to establish its junction with the psychology of the neuroses. I am conscious of all the
difficulties which this involves for the reader, but I know of no way to avoid them.

Since I am dissatisfied with this state of affairs, I am glad to dwell upon another point of view, which would seem
to enhance the value of my efforts. As was shown in the introductory section, I found myself confronted with a theme
which had been marked by the sharpest contradictions on the part of those who had written on it. In the course of our
treatment of the problems of the dream, room has been found for most of these contradictory views. We have been
compelled to take decided exception to two only of the views expressed: namely, that the dream is a meaningless
process, and that it is a somatic process. Apart from these, we have been able to find a place for the truth of all the
contradictory opinions at one point or another of the complicated tissue of the facts, and we have been able to show
that each expressed something genuine and correct. That our dreams continue the impulses and interests of waking life
has been generally confirmed by the discovery of the hidden dream-thoughts. These concern themselves only with things
that seem to us important and of great interest. Dreams never occupy themselves with trifles. But we have accepted also
the opposite view, namely, that the dream gathers up the indifferent residues of the day, and cannot seize upon any
important interest of the day until it has in some measure withdrawn itself from waking activity. We have found that
this holds true of the dream-content, which by means of distortion gives the dream-thought an altered expression. We
have said that the dream-process, owing to the nature of the mechanism of association, finds it easier to obtain
possession of recent or indifferent material, which has not yet been put under an embargo by our waking mental
activity; and that, on account of the censorship, it transfers the psychic intensity of the significant but also
objectionable material to the indifferent. The hypermnesia of the dream and its ability to dispose of infantile
material have become the main foundations of our doctrine; in our theory of dreams we have assigned to a wish of
infantile origin the part of the indispensable motive-power of dream-formation. It has not, of course, occurred to us
to doubt the experimentally demonstrated significance of external sensory stimuli during sleep; but we have placed this
material in the same relation to the dream-wish as the thought-residues left over from our waking activity. We need not
dispute the fact that the dream interprets objective sensory stimuli after the manner of an illusion; but we have
supplied the motive for this interpretation, which has been left indeterminate by other writers. The interpretation
proceeds in such a way that the perceived object is rendered harmless as a source of disturbance of sleep, whilst it is
made usable for the wish-fulfilment. Though we do not admit as a special source of dreams the subjective state of
excitation of the sensory organs during sleep (which seems to have been demonstrated by Trumbull Ladd), we are,
nevertheless, able to explain this state of excitation by the regressive revival of the memories active behind the
dream. As to the internal organic sensations, which are wont to be taken as the cardinal point of the explanation of
dreams, these, too, find a place in our conception, though indeed a more modest one. These sensations — the sensations
of falling, of soaring, or of being inhibited — represent an ever-ready material, which the dream-work can employ to
express the dream-thought as often as need arises.

That the dream-process is a rapid and momentary one is, we believe, true as regards the perception by consciousness
of the preformed dream-content; but we have found that the preceding portions of the dream-process probably follow a
slow, fluctuating course. As for the riddle of the superabundant dream-content compressed into the briefest moment of
time, we have been able to contribute the explanation that the dream seizes upon ready-made formations of the psychic
life. We have found that it is true that dreams are distorted and mutilated by the memory, but that this fact presents
no difficulties, as it is only the last manifest portion of a process of distortion which has been going on from the
very beginning of the dream-work. In the embittered controversy, which has seemed irreconcilable, whether the psychic
life is asleep at night, or can make the same use of all its faculties as during the day, we have been able to conclude
that both sides are right, but that neither is entirely so. In the dream-thoughts we found evidence of a highly
complicated intellectual activity, operating with almost all the resources of the psychic apparatus; yet it cannot be
denied that these dream-thoughts have originated during the day, and it is indispensable to assume that there is a
sleeping state of the psychic life. Thus, even the doctrine of partial sleep received its due, but we have found the
characteristic feature of the sleeping state not in the disintegration of the psychic system of connections, but in the
special attitude adopted by the psychic system which is dominant during the day — the attitude of the wish to sleep.
The deflection from the outer world retains its significance for our view, too; though not the only factor at work, it
helps to make possible the regressive course of the dream-representation. The abandonment of voluntary guidance of the
flow of ideas is incontestable; but psychic life does not thereby become aimless, for we have seen that upon
relinquishment of the voluntary directing ideas, involuntary ones take charge. On the other hand, we have not only
recognized the loose associative connection of the dream, but have brought a far greater area within the scope of this
kind of connection than could have been suspected; we have, however, found it merely an enforced substitute for
another, a correct and significant type of association. To be sure, we too have called the dream absurd, but examples
have shown us how wise the dream is when it simulates absurdity. As regards the functions that have been attributed to
the dream, we are able to accept them all. That the dream relieves the mind, like a safety-valve, and that, as Robert
has put it, all kinds of harmful material are rendered harmless by representation in the dream, not only coincides
exactly with our own theory of the twofold wish-fulfilment in the dream, but in its very wording becomes more
intelligible for us than it is for Robert himself. The free indulgence of the psyche in the play of its faculties is
reproduced in our theory as the non-interference of the preconscious activity with the dream. The return of the
embryonal standpoint of psychic life in the dream, and Havelock Ellis's remark that the dream is "an archaic world of
vast emotions and imperfect thoughts," appear to us as happy anticipations of our own exposition, which asserts that
primitive modes of operations that are suppressed during the day play a part in the formation of dreams. We can fully
identify ourselves with Sully's statement, that "our dreams bring back again our earlier and successively developed
personalities, our old ways of regarding things, with impulses and modes of reaction which ruled us long ago"; and for
us, as for Delage, the suppressed material becomes the mainspring of the dream.

We have fully accepted the role that Scherner ascribes to the dream-phantasy, and his own interpretations, but we
have been obliged to transpose them, as it were, to another part of the problem. It is not the dream that creates the
phantasy, but the activity of unconscious phantasy that plays the leading part in the formation of the dream-thoughts.
We remain indebted to Scherner for directing us to the source of the dream-thoughts, but almost everything that he
ascribes to the dream-work is attributable to the activity of the unconscious during the day, which instigates dreams
no less than neurotic symptoms. The dream-work we had to separate from this activity as something quite different and
far more closely controlled. Finally, we have by no means renounced the relation of the dream to psychic disturbances,
but have given it, on new ground, a more solid foundation.

Held together by the new features in our theory as by a superior unity, we find the most varied and most
contradictory conclusions of other writers fitting into our structure; many of them are given a different turn, but
only a few of them are wholly rejected. But our own structure is still unfinished. For apart from the many obscure
questions in which we have involved ourselves by our advance into the dark regions of psychology, we are now, it would
seem, embarrassed by a new contradiction. On the one hand, we have made it appear that the dream-thoughts proceed from
perfectly normal psychic activities, but on the other hand we have found among the dream-thoughts a number of entirely
abnormal mental processes, which extend also to the dream-content, and which we reproduce in the interpretation of the
dream. All that we have termed the dream-work seems to depart so completely from the psychic processes which we
recognize as correct and appropriate that the severest judgments expressed by the writers mentioned as to the low level
of psychic achievement of dreams must appear well founded.

Here, perhaps, only further investigations can provide an explanation and set us on the right path. Let me pick out
for renewed attention one of the constellations which lead to dream-formation.

We have learned that the dream serves as a substitute for a number of thoughts derived from our daily life, and
which fit together with perfect logic. We cannot, therefore, doubt that these thoughts have their own origin in our
normal mental life. All the qualities which we value in our thought-processes, and which mark them out as complicated
performances of a high order, we shall find repeated in the dream-thoughts. There is, however, no need to assume that
this mental work is performed during sleep; such an assumption would badly confuse the conception of the psychic state
of sleep to which we have hitherto adhered. On the contrary, these thoughts may very well have their origin in the
daytime, and, unremarked by our consciousness, may have gone on from their first stimulus until, at the onset of sleep,
they have reached completion. If we are to conclude anything from this state of affairs, it can only be that it proves
that the most complex mental operations are possible without the cooperation of consciousness — a truth which we have
had to learn anyhow from every psycho-analysis of a patient suffering from hysteria or obsessions. These dream-thoughts
are certainly not in themselves incapable of consciousness; if we have not become conscious of them during the day,
this may have been due to various reasons. The act of becoming conscious depends upon a definite psychic function-
attention — being brought to bear. This seems to be available only in a determinate quantity, which may have been
diverted from the train of thought in question by other aims. Another way in which such trains of thought may be
withheld from consciousness is the following: From our conscious reflection we know that, when applying our attention,
we follow a particular course. But if that course leads us to an idea which cannot withstand criticism, we break off
and allow the cathexis of attention to drop. Now, it would seem that the train of thought thus started and abandoned
may continue to develop without our attention returning to it, unless at some point it attains a specially high
intensity which compels attention. An initial conscious rejection by our judgment, on the ground of incorrectness or
uselessness for the immediate purpose of the act of thought, may, therefore, be the cause of a thought-process going on
unnoticed by consciousness until the onset of sleep.

Let us now recapitulate: We call such a train of thought a preconscious train, and we believe it to be perfectly
correct, and that it may equally well be a merely neglected train or one that has been interrupted and suppressed. Let
us also state in plain terms how we visualize the movement of our thought. We believe that a certain quantity of
excitation, which we call cathectic energy, is displaced from a purposive idea along the association paths selected by
this directing idea. A neglected train of thought has received no such cathexis, and the cathexis has been withdrawn
from one that was suppressed or rejected; both have thus been left to their own excitations. The train of thought
cathected by some aim becomes able under certain conditions to attract the attention of consciousness, and by the
mediation of consciousness it then receives hyper-cathexis. We shall be obliged presently to elucidate our assumptions
as to the nature and function of consciousness.

A train of thought thus incited in the Pcs may either disappear spontaneously, or it may continue. The former
eventuality we conceive as follows: it diffuses its energy through all the association paths emanating from it, and
throws the entire chain of thoughts into a state of excitation, which continues for a while, and then subsides, through
the excitation which had called for discharge being transformed into dormant cathexis. If this first eventuality
occurs, the process has no further significance for dream-formation. But other directing ideas are lurking in our
preconscious, which have their source in our unconscious and ever — active wishes. These may gain control of the
excitation in the circle of thoughts thus left to itself, establish a connection between it and the unconscious wish,
and transfer to it the energy inherent in the unconscious wish. Henceforth the neglected or suppressed train of thought
is in a position to maintain itself, although this reinforcement gives it no claim to access to consciousness. We may
say, then, that the hitherto preconscious train of thought has been drawn into the unconscious.

Other constellations leading to dream-formation might be as follows: The preconscious train of thought might have
been connected from the beginning with the unconscious wish, and for that reason might have met with rejection by the
dominating aim — cathexis. Or an unconscious wish might become active for other (possibly somatic) reasons, and of its
own accord seek a transference to the psychic residues not cathected by the Pcs. All three cases have the same result:
there is established in the preconscious a train of thought which, having been abandoned by the preconscious cathexis,
has acquired cathexis from the unconscious wish.

From this point onward the train of thought is subjected to a series of transformations which we no longer recognize
as normal psychic processes, and which give a result that we find strange, a psychopathological formation. Let us now
emphasize and bring together these transformations:

1. The intensities of the individual ideas become capable of discharge in their entirety, and pass from one idea to
another, so that individual ideas are formed which are endowed with great intensity. Through the repeated occurrence of
this process, the intensity of an entire train of thought may ultimately be concentrated in a single conceptual unit.
This is the fact of compression or condensation with which we become acquainted when investigating the dream-work. It
is condensation that is mainly responsible for the strange impression produced by dreams, for we know of nothing
analogous to it in the normal psychic life that is accessible to consciousness. We get here, too, ideas which are of
great psychic significance as nodal points or as end-results of whole chains of thought, but this value is not
expressed by any character actually manifest for our internal perception; what is represented in it is not in any way
made more intensive. In the process of condensation the whole set of psychic connections becomes transformed into the
intensity of the idea-content. The situation is the same as when, in the case of a book, I italicize or print in heavy
type any word to which I attach outstanding value for the understanding of the text. In speech, I should pronounce the
same word loudly, and deliberately, and with emphasis. The first simile points immediately to one of the examples which
were given of the dream-work (trimethylamine in the dream of Irma's injection). Historians of art call our attention to
the fact that the most ancient sculptures known to history follow a similar principle, in expressing the rank of the
persons represented by the size of the statues. The king is made two or three times as tall as his retinue or his
vanquished enemies. But a work of art of the Roman period makes use of more subtle means to accomplish the same end.
The figure of the Emperor is placed in the centre, erect and in his full height, and special care is bestowed on the
modelling of this figure; his enemies are seen cowering at his feet; but he is no longer made to seem a giant among
dwarfs. At the same time, in the bowing of the subordinate to his superior, even in our own day, we have an echo of
this ancient principle of representation.

The direction followed by the condensations of the dream is prescribed on the one hand by the true preconscious
relations of the dream-thoughts, and, on the other hand, by the attraction of the visual memories in the unconscious.
The success of the condensation-work produces those intensities which are required for penetration to the
perception-system.

2. By the free transference of intensities, and in the service of the condensation, intermediary ideas —
compromises, as it were — are formed (cf. the numerous examples). This, also, is something unheard of in the normal
movement of our ideas, where what is of most importance is the selection and the retention of the right conceptual
material. On the other hand, composite and compromise formations occur with extraordinary frequency when we are trying
to find verbal expression for preconscious thoughts; these are considered slips of the tongue.

3. The ideas which transfer their intensities to one another are very loosely connected, and are joined together by
such forms of association as are disdained by our serious thinking, and left to be exploited solely by wit. In
particular, assonances and punning associations are treated as equal in value to any other associations.

4. Contradictory thoughts do not try to eliminate one another, but continue side by side, and often combine to form
condensation — products, as though no contradiction existed; or they form compromises for which we should never forgive
our thought, but which we frequently sanction in our action.

These are some of the most conspicuous abnormal processes to which the dream-thoughts which have previously been
rationally formed are subjected in the course of the dream-work. As the main feature of these processes, we may see
that the greatest importance is attached to rendering the cathecting energy mobile and capable of discharge; the
content and the intrinsic significance of the psychic elements to which these cathexes adhere become matters of
secondary importance. One might perhaps assume that condensation and compromise-formation are effected only in the
service of regression, when the occasion arises for changing thoughts into images. But the analysis — and still more
plainly the synthesis — of such dreams as show no regression towards images, e.g., the dream Autodidasker: Conversation
with Professor N, reveals the same processes of displacement and condensation as do the rest.

We cannot, therefore, avoid the conclusion that two kinds of essentially different psychic processes participate in
dream-formation; one forms perfectly correct and fitting dream-thoughts, equivalent to the results of normal thinking,
while the other deals with these thoughts in a most astonishing and, as it seems, incorrect way. The latter process we
have already set apart in chapter VI as the dream-work proper. What can we say now as to the derivation of this psychic
process?

It would be impossible to answer this question here if we had not penetrated a considerable way into the psychology
of the neuroses, and especially of hysteria. From this, however, we learn that the same "incorrect" psychic processes-
as well as others not enumerated — control the production of hysterical symptoms. In hysteria, too, we find at first a
series of perfectly correct and fitting thoughts, equivalent to our conscious ones, of whose existence in this form we
can, however, learn nothing, i.e., which we can only subsequently reconstruct. If they have forced their way anywhere
to perception, we discover from the analysis of the symptom formed that these normal thoughts have been subjected to
abnormal treatment, and that by means of condensation and compromise-formation, through superficial associations which
cover up contradictions, and eventually along the path of regression, they have been conveyed into the symptom. In view
of the complete identity between the peculiarities of the dream-work and those of the psychic activity which issues in
psychoneurotic symptoms, we shall feel justified in transferring to the dream the conclusions urged upon us by
hysteria.

From the theory of hysteria we borrow the proposition that such an abnormal psychic elaboration of a normal train of
thought takes place only when the latter has been used for the transference of an unconscious wish which dares from the
infantile life and is in a state of repression. Complying with this proposition, we have built up the theory of the
dream on the assumption that the actuating dream-wish invariably originates in the unconscious; which, as we have
ourselves admitted, cannot be universally demonstrated, even though it cannot be refuted. But in order to enable us to
say just what repression is, after employing this term so freely, we shall be obliged to make a further addition to our
psychological scaffolding.

We had elaborated the fiction of a primitive psychic apparatus, the work of which is regulated by the effort to
avoid accumulation of excitation, and as far as possible to maintain itself free from excitation. For this reason it
was constructed after the plan of a reflex apparatus; motility, in the first place as the path to changes within the
body, was the channel of discharge at its disposal. We then discussed the psychic results of experiences of
gratification, and were able at this point to introduce a second assumption, namely, that the accumulation of
excitation — by processes that do not concern us here — is felt as pain, and sets the apparatus in operation in order
to bring about again a state of gratification, in which the diminution of excitation is perceived as pleasure. Such a
current in the apparatus, issuing from pain and striving for pleasure, we call a wish. We have said that nothing but a
wish is capable of setting the apparatus in motion and that the course of any excitation in the apparatus is regulated
automatically by the perception of pleasure and pain. The first occurrence of wishing may well have taken the form of a
hallucinatory cathexis of the memory of gratification. But this hallucination, unless it could be maintained to the
point of exhaustion, proved incapable of bringing about a cessation of the need, and consequently of securing the
pleasure connected with gratification.

Thus, there was required a second activity — in our terminology the activity of a second system — which would not
allow the memory — cathexis to force its way to perception and thence to bind the psychic forces, but would lead the
excitation emanating from the need-stimulus by a detour, which by means of voluntary motility would ultimately so
change the outer world as to permit the real perception of the gratifying object. Thus far we have already elaborated
the scheme of the psychic apparatus; these two systems are the germ of what we set up in the fully developed apparatus
as the Ucs and Pcs.

To change the outer world appropriately by means of motility requires the accumulation of a large total of
experiences in the memory-systems, as well as a manifold consolidation of the relations which are evoked in this
memory-material by various directing ideas. We will now proceed further with our assumptions. The activity of the
second system, groping in many directions, tentatively sending forth cathexes and retracting them, needs on the one
hand full command over all memory — material, but on the other hand it would be a superfluous expenditure of energy
were it to send along the individual thought-paths large quantities of cathexis, which would then flow away to no
purpose and thus diminish the quantity needed for changing the outer world. Out of a regard for purposiveness,
therefore, I postulate that the second system succeeds in maintaining the greater part of the energic cathexes in a
state of rest, and in using only a small portion for its operations of displacement. The mechanics of these processes
is entirely unknown to me; anyone who seriously wishes to follow up these ideas must address himself to the physical
analogies, and find some way of getting a picture of the sequence of motions which ensues on the excitation of the
neurones. Here I do no more than hold fast to the idea that the activity of the first Psi-system aims at the free
outflow of the quantities of excitation, and that the second system, by means of the cathexes emanating from it,
effects an inhibition of this outflow, a transformation into dormant cathexis, probably with a rise of potential. I
therefore assume that the course taken by any excitation under the control of the second system is bound to quite
different mechanical conditions from those which obtain under the control of the first system. After the second system
has completed its work of experimental thought, it removes the inhibition and damming up of the excitations and allows
them to flow off into motility.

An interesting train of thought now presents itself if we consider the relations of this inhibition of discharge by
the second system to the process of regulation by the pain-principle. Let us now seek out the counterpart of the
primary experience of gratification, namely, the objective experience of fear. Let a perception-stimulus act on the
primitive apparatus and be the source of a pain-excitation. There will then ensue uncoordinated motor manifestations,
which will go on until one of these withdraws the apparatus from perception, and at the same time from the pain. On the
reappearance of the percept this manifestation will immediately be repeated (perhaps as a movement of flight), until
the percept has again disappeared. But in this case no tendency will remain to recathect the perception of the source
of pain by hallucination or otherwise. On the contrary, there will be a tendency in the primary apparatus to turn away
again from this painful memory-image immediately if it is in any way awakened, since the overflow of its excitation
into perception would, of course, evoke (or more precisely, begin to evoke) pain. This turning away from a
recollection, which is merely a repetition of the former flight from perception, is also facilitated by the fact that,
unlike the perception, the recollection has not enough quality to arouse consciousness, and thereby to attract fresh
cathexis. This effortless and regular turning away of the psychic process from the memory of anything that had once
been painful gives us the prototype and the first example of psychic repression. We all know how much of this turning
away from the painful, the tactics of the ostrich, may still be shown as present even in the normal psychic life of
adults.

In obedience to the pain-principle, therefore, the first Psi — system is quite incapable of introducing anything
unpleasant into the thought-nexus. The system cannot do anything but wish. If this were to remain so, the activity of
thought of the second system, which needs to have at its disposal all the memories stored up by experience, would be
obstructed. But two paths are now open: either the work of the second system frees itself completely from the
pain-principle, and continues its course, paying no heed to the pain attached to given memories, or it contrives to
cathect the memory of the pain in such a manner as to preclude the liberation of pain. We can reject the first
possibility, as the pain-principle also proves to act as a regulator of the cycle of excitation in the second system;
we are therefore thrown back upon the second possibility, namely, that this system cathects a memory in such a manner
as to inhibit any outflow of excitation from it, and hence, also, the outflow, comparable to a motor-innervation,
needed for the development of pain. And thus, setting out from two different starting-points, i.e., from regard for the
pain-principle, and from the principle of the least expenditure of innervation, we are led to the hypothesis that
cathexis through the second system is at the same time an inhibition of the discharge of excitation. Let us, however,
keep a close hold on the fact — for this is the key to the theory of repression — that the second system can only
cathect an idea when it is in a position to inhibit any pain emanating from this idea. Anything that withdrew itself
from this inhibition would also remain inaccessible for the second system, i.e., would immediately be given up by
virtue of the pain — principle. The inhibition of pain, however, need not be complete; it must be permitted to begin,
since this indicates to the second system the nature of the memory, and possibly its lack of fitness for the purpose
sought by the process of thought.

The psychic process which is alone tolerated by the first system I shall now call the primary process; and that
which results under the inhibiting action of the second system I shall call the secondary process. I can also show at
another point for what purpose the second system is obliged to correct the primary process. The primary process strives
for discharge of the excitation in order to establish with the quantity of excitation thus collected an identity of
perception; the secondary process has abandoned this intention, and has adopted instead the aim of an identity of
thought. All thinking is merely a detour from the memory of gratification (taken as a purposive idea) to the identical
cathexis of the same memory, which is to be reached once more by the path of motor experiences. Thought must concern
itself with the connecting-paths between ideas without allowing itself to be misled by their intensities. But it is
obvious that condensations of ideas and intermediate or compromise-formations are obstacles to the attainment of the
identity which is aimed at; by substituting one idea for another they swerve away from the path which would have led
onward from the first idea. Such procedures are, therefore, carefully avoided in our secondary thinking. It will
readily be seen, moreover, that the pain — principle, although at other times it provides the thought — process with
its most important clues, may also put difficulties in its way in the pursuit of identity of thought. Hence, the
tendency of the thinking process must always be to free itself more and more from exclusive regulation by the
pain-principle, and to restrict the development of affect through the work of thought to the very minimum which remains
effective as a signal. This refinement in functioning is to be achieved by a fresh hyper — cathexis, effected with the
help of consciousness. But we are aware that this refinement is seldom successful, even in normal psychic life, and
that our thinking always remains liable to falsification by the intervention of the pain-principle.

This, however, is not the breach in the functional efficiency of our psychic apparatus which makes it possible for
thoughts representing the result of the secondary thought-work to fall into the power of the primary psychic process;
by which formula we may now describe the operations resulting in dreams and the symptoms of hysteria. This inadequacy
results from the converging of two factors in our development, one of which pertains solely to the psychic apparatus,
and has exercised a determining influence on the relation of the two systems, while the other operates fluctuatingly,
and introduces motive forces of organic origin into the psychic life. Both originate in the infantile life, and are a
precipitate of the alteration which our psychic and somatic organism has undergone since our infantile years.

When I termed one of the psychic processes in the psychic apparatus the primary process, I did so not only in
consideration of its status and function, but was also able to take account of the temporal relationship actually
involved. So far as we know, a psychic apparatus possessing only the primary process does not exist, and is to that
extent a theoretical fiction but this at least is a fact: that the primary processes are present in the apparatus from
the beginning, while the secondary processes only take shape gradually during the course of life, inhibiting and
overlaying the primary, whilst gaining complete control over them perhaps only in the prime of life. Owing to this
belated arrival of the secondary processes, the essence of our being, consisting of unconscious wish-impulses, remains
something which cannot be grasped or inhibited by the preconscious; and its part is once and for all restricted to
indicating the most appropriate paths for the wish-impulses originating in the unconscious. These unconscious wishes
represent for all subsequent psychic strivings a compulsion to which they Must submit themselves, although they may
perhaps endeavour to divert them and to guide them to superior aims. In consequence of this retardation, an extensive
region of the memory-material remains in fact inaccessible to preconscious cathexis.

Now among these wish-impulses originating in the infantile life. indestructible and incapable of inhibition, there
are some the fulfilments of which have come to be in contradiction with the purposive ideas of our secondary thinking.
The fulfilment of these wishes would no longer produce an affect of pleasure, but one of pain; and it is just this
conversion of affect that constitutes the essence of what we call repression. In what manner and by what motive forces
such a conversion can take place constitutes the problem of repression, which we need here only to touch upon in
passing. It will suffice to note the fact that such a conversion of affect occurs in the course of development (one
need only think of the emergence of disgust, originally absent in infantile life), and that it is connected with the
activity of the secondary system. The memories from which the unconscious wish evokes a liberation of affect have never
been accessible to the Pcs, and for that reason this liberation cannot be inhibited. It is precisely on account of this
generation of affect that these ideas are not now accessible even by way of the preconscious thoughts to which they
have transferred the energy of the wishes connected with them. On the contrary, the pain — principle comes into play,
and causes the Pcs to turn away from these transference-thoughts. These latter are left to themselves, are repressed,
and thus, the existence of a store of infantile memories, withdrawn from the beginning from the Pcs, becomes the
preliminary condition of repression.

In the most favourable case, the generation of pain terminates so soon as the cathexis is withdrawn from the
transference-thoughts in the Pcs, and this result shows that the intervention of the pain-principle is appropriate. It
is otherwise, however, if the repressed unconscious wish receives an organic reinforcement which it can put at the
service of its transference-thoughts, and by which it can enable them to attempt to break through with their
excitation, even if the cathexis of the Pcs has been taken away from them. A defensive struggle then ensues, inasmuch
as the Pcs reinforces the opposite to the repressed thoughts (counter — cathexis), and the eventual outcome is that the
transference — thoughts (the carriers of the unconscious wish) break through in some form of compromise through
symptom-formation. But from the moment that the repressed thoughts are powerfully cathected by the unconscious
wish-impulse, but forsaken by the preconscious cathexis, they succumb to the primary psychic process, and aim only at
motor discharge; or, if the way is clear, at hallucinatory revival of the desired identity of perception. We have
already found, empirically, that the incorrect processes described are enacted only with thoughts which are in a state
of repression. We are now in a position to grasp yet another part of the total scheme of the facts. These incorrect
Processes are the primary processes of the psychic apparatus; they occur wherever ideas abandoned by the preconscious
cathexis are left to themselves and can become filled with the uninhibited energy which flows from the unconscious and
strives for discharge. There are further facts which go to show that the processes described as incorrect are not
really falsifications of our normal procedure, or defective thinking. but the modes of operation of the psychic
apparatus when freed from inhibition. Thus we see that the process of the conveyance of the preconscious excitation to
motility occurs in accordance with the same procedure, and that in the linkage of preconscious ideas with words we may
easily find manifested the same displacements and confusions (which we ascribe to inattention). Finally, a proof of the
increased work made necessary by the inhibition of these primary modes of procedure might be found in the fact that we
achieve a comical effect, a surplus to be discharged through laughter, if we allow these modes of thought to come to
consciousness.

The theory of the psychoneuroses asserts with absolute certainty that it can only be sexual wish-impulses from the
infantile life, which have undergone repression (affect-conversion) during the developmental period of childhood, which
are capable of renewal at later periods of development (whether as a result of our sexual constitution, which has, of
course, grown out of an original bi-sexuality, or in consequence of unfavourable influences in our sexual life); and
which therefore supply the motive-power for all psychoneurotic symptom-formation. It is only by the introduction of
these sexual forces that the gaps still demonstrable in the theory of repression can be filled. Here, I will leave it
undecided whether the postulate of the sexual and infantile holds good for the theory of dreams as well; I am not
completing the latter, because in assuming that the dream-wish invariably originates in the unconscious I have already
gone a step beyond the demonstrable. 1 Nor will I inquire further into the nature of the difference between
the play of psychic forces in dream-formation and in the formation of hysterical symptoms, since there is missing here
the needed fuller knowledge of one of the two things to be compared. But there is another point which I regard as
important, and I will confess at once that it was only on account of this point that I entered upon all the discussions
concerning the two psychic systems, their modes of operation, and the fact of repression. It does not greatly matter
whether I have conceived the psychological relations at issue with approximate correctness, or, as is easily possible
in such a difficult matter, wrongly and imperfectly. However our views may change about the interpretation of the
psychic censorship or the correct and the abnormal elaboration of the dream-content. it remains certain that such
processes are active in dream-formation, and that in their essentials they reveal the closest analogy with the
processes observed in the formation of hysterical symptoms. Now the dream is not a pathological phenomenon; it does not
presuppose any disturbance of our psychic equilibrium; and it does not leave behind it any weakening of our efficiency
or capacities. The objection that no conclusions can be drawn about the dreams of healthy persons from my own dreams
and from those of my neurotic patients may be rejected without comment. If, then, from the nature of the given
phenomena we infer the nature of their motive forces, we find that the psychic mechanism utilized by the neuroses is
not newly-created by a morbid disturbance that lays hold of the psychic life, but lies in readiness in the normal
structure of our psychic apparatus. The two psychic systems, the frontier-censorship between them, the inhibition and
overlaying of the one activity by the other, the relations of both to consciousness — or whatever may take place of
these concepts on a juster interpretation of the actual relations — all these belong to the normal structure of our
psychic instrument, and the dream shows us one of the paths which lead to a knowledge of this structure. If we wish to
be content with a minimum of perfectly assured additions to our knowledge, we shall say that the dream affords proof
that the suppressed material continues to exist even in the normal person and remains capable of psychic activity.
Dreams are one of the manifestations of this suppressed material; theoretically, this is true in all cases; and in
tangible experience, it has been found true in at least a great number of cases, which happen to display most plainly
the more striking features of the dream-life. The suppressed psychic material, which in the waking state has been
prevented from expression and cut off from internal perception by the mutual neutralization of contradictory attitudes,
finds ways and means, under the sway of compromise-formations, of obtruding itself on consciousness during the
night.

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. 2

At any rate, the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious element in our psychic
life.

1 Here, as elsewhere, there are gaps in the treatment of the subject, which I have
deliberately left, because to fill them up would, on the one hand, require excessive labour, and, on the other hand, I
should have to depend on material which is foreign to the dream. Thus, for example, I have avoided stating whether I
give the word suppressed a different meaning from that of the word repressed. No doubt, however, it will have become
clear that the latter emphasizes more than the former the relation to the unconscious. I have not gone into the
problem, which obviously arises, of why the dream-thoughts undergo distortion by the censorship even when they abandon
the progressive path to consciousness, and choose the path of regression. And so with other similar omissions. I have,
above all, sought to give some idea of the problems to which the further dissection of the dream-work leads, and to
indicate the other themes with which these are connected. It was, however, not always easy to decide just where the
pursuit should be discontinued. That I have not treated exhaustively the part which the psycho-sexual life plays in the
dream, and have avoided the interpretation of dreams of an obviously sexual content, is due to a special reason — which
may not perhaps be that which the reader would expect. It is absolutely alien to my views and my neuropathological
doctrines to regard the sexual life as a pudendum with which neither the physician nor the scientific investigator
should concern himself. To me, the moral indignation which prompted the translator of Artemidorus of Daldis to keep
from the reader's knowledge the chapter on sexual dreams contained in the Symbolism of Dreams is merely ludicrous. For
my own part, what decided my procedure was solely the knowledge that in the explanation of sexual dreams I should be
bound to get deeply involved in the still unexplained problems of perversion and bisexuality; it was for this reason
that I reserved this material for treatment elsewhere.

2 If I cannot influence the gods, I will stir up Acheron.

By the analysis of dreams we obtain some insight into the composition of this most marvellous and most mysterious of
instruments; it is true that this only takes us a little way, but it gives us a start which enables us, setting out
from the angle of other (properly pathological) formations, to penetrate further in our disjoining of the instrument.
For disease — at all events that which is rightly called functional — does not necessarily presuppose the destruction
of this apparatus, or the establishment of new cleavages in its interior: it can be explained dynamically by the
strengthening and weakening of the components of the play of forces, so many of the activities of which are covered up
in normal functioning. It might be shown elsewhere how the fact that the apparatus is a combination of two instances
also permits of a refinement of its normal functioning which would have been impossible to a single system.
1

1 The dream is not the only phenomenon that permits us to base our psycho-pathology on
psychology. In a short unfinished series of articles in the Monatsschrift fur Psychiatrie und Neurologie ("uber den
psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit," 1898, and "uber Deckerinnerungen," 1899) I attempted to interpret a
number of psychic manifestations from everyday life in support of the same conception. (These and other articles on
"Forgetting," "Lapses of Speech," etc., have now been published in the Psycho — pathology of Everyday Life.)

F. The Unconscious and Consciousness. Reality.

If we look more closely, we may observe that the psychological considerations examined in the foregoing chapter
require us to assume, not the existence of two systems near the motor end of the psychic apparatus, but two kinds of
processes or courses taken by excitation. But this does not disturb us; for we must always be ready to drop our
auxiliary ideas, when we think we are in a position to replace them by something which comes closer to the unknown
reality. Let us now try to correct certain views which may have taken a misconceived form as long as we regarded the
two systems, in the crudest and most obvious sense, as two localities within the psychic apparatus — views which have
left a precipitate in the terms repression and penetration. Thus, when we say that an unconscious thought strives for
translation into the preconscious in order subsequently to penetrate through to consciousness, we do not mean that a
second idea has to be formed, in a new locality, like a paraphrase, as it were, whilst the original persists by its
side; and similarly, when we speak of penetration into consciousness, we wish carefully to detach from this notion any
idea of a change of locality. When we say that a preconscious idea is repressed and subsequently absorbed by the
unconscious, we might be tempted by these images, borrowed from the idea of a struggle for a particular territory, to
assume that an arrangement is really broken up in the one psychic locality and replaced by a new one in the other
locality. For these comparisons we will substitute a description which would seem to correspond more closely to the
real state of affairs; we will say that an energic cathexis is shifted to or withdrawn from a certain arrangement, so
that the psychic formation falls under the domination of a given instance or is withdrawn from it. Here again we
replace a topographical mode of representation by a dynamic one; it is not the psychic formation that appears to us as
the mobile element, but its innervation. 1

1 This conception underwent elaboration and modification when it was recognized that the
essential character of a preconscious idea was its connection with the residues of verbal ideas. See The Unconscious,
p. 428 below.

Nevertheless, I think it expedient and justifiable to continue to use the illustrative idea of the two systems. We
shall avoid any abuse of this mode of representation if we remember that ideas, thoughts, and psychic formations in
general must not in any case be localized in organic elements of the nervous system but, so to speak, between them,
where resistances and association-tracks form the correlate corresponding to them. Everything that can become an object
of internal perception is virtual, like the image in the telescope produced by the crossing of light-rays. But we are
justified in thinking of the systems — which have nothing psychic in themselves, and which never become accessible to
our psychic perception — as something similar to the lenses of the telescope, which project the image. If we continue
this comparison, we might say that the censorship between the two systems corresponds to the refraction of rays on
passing into a new medium.

Thus far, we have developed our psychology on our own responsibility; it is now time to turn and look at the
doctrines prevailing in modern psychology, and to examine the relation of these to our theories. The problem of the
unconscious in psychology is, according to the forcible statement of Lipps, 1 less a psychological problem
than the problem of psychology. As long as psychology disposed of this problem by the verbal explanation that the
psychic is the conscious, and that unconscious psychic occurrences are an obvious contradiction, there was no
possibility of a physician's observations of abnormal mental states being turned to any psychological account. The
physician and the philosopher can meet only when both acknowledge that unconscious psychic processes is the appropriate
and justified expression for all established fact. The physician cannot but reject, with a shrug of his shoulders, the
assertion that consciousness is the indispensable quality of the psychic; if his respect for the utterances of the
philosophers is still great enough, he may perhaps assume that he and they do not deal with the same thing and do not
pursue the same science. For a single intelligent observation of the psychic life of a neurotic, a single analysis of a
dream, must force upon him the unshakable conviction that the most complicated and the most accurate operations of
thought, to which the name of psychic occurrences can surely not be refused, may take place without arousing
consciousness. 2 The physician, it is true, does not learn of these unconscious processes until they have
produced an effect on consciousness which admits of communication or observation. But this effect on consciousness may
show a psychic character which differs completely from the unconscious process, so that internal perception cannot
possibly recognize in the first a substitute for the second. The physician must reserve himself the right to penetrate,
by a Process of deduction, from the effect on consciousness to the unconscious psychic process; he learns in this way
that the effect on consciousness is only a remote psychic product of the unconscious process, and that the latter has
not become conscious as such, and has, moreover, existed and operated without in any way betraying itself to
consciousness.

1 Der Begriff des Unbewussten in der Psychologie. Lecture delivered at the Third
International Psychological Congress at Munich, 1897.

2 I am happy to be able to point to an author who has drawn from the study of dreams the
same conclusion as regards the relation between consciousness and the unconscious.

Du Prel says: "The problem: what is the psyche, manifestly requires a preliminary examination as to whether
consciousness and psyche are identical. But it is just this preliminary question which is answered in the negative by
the dream, which shows that the concept of the psyche extends beyond that of consciousness, much as the gravitational
force of a star extends beyond its sphere of luminosity" (Philos. d. Mystik, p. 47).

"It is a truth which cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the concepts of consciousness and of the psyche are not
co-extensive" (p. 306).

A return from the over-estimation of the property of consciousness is the indispensable preliminary to any genuine
insight into the course of psychic events. As Lipps has said, the unconscious must be accepted as the general basis of
the psychic life. The unconscious is the larger circle which includes the smaller circle of the conscious; everything
conscious has a preliminary unconscious stage, whereas the unconscious can stop at this stage, and yet claim to be
considered a full psychic function. The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner nature it is just as much
unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly communicated to us by the data of
consciousness as is the external world by the reports of our sense-organs.

We get rid of a series of dream-problems which have claimed much attention from earlier writers on the subject when
the old antithesis between conscious life and dream-life is discarded, and the unconscious psychic assigned to its
proper place. Thus, many of the achievements which are a matter for wonder in a dream are now no longer to be
attributed to dreaming, but to unconscious thinking, which is active also during the day. If the dream seems to make
play with a symbolical representation of the body, as Scherner has said, we know that this is the work of certain
unconscious phantasies, which are probably under the sway of sexual impulses and find expression not only in dreams,
but also in hysterical phobias and other symptoms. If the dream continues and completes mental work begun during the
day, and even brings valuable new ideas to light, we have only to strip off the dream-disguise from this, as the
contribution of the dream-work, and a mark of the assistance of dark powers in the depths of the psyche (cf. the devil
in Tartini's sonata-dream). The intellectual achievement as such belongs to the same psychic forces as are responsible
for all such achievements during the day. We are probably much too inclined to over-estimate the conscious character
even of intellectual and artistic production. From the reports of certain writers who have been highly productive, such
as Goethe and Helmholtz, we learn, rather, that the most essential and original part of their creations came to them in
the form of inspirations, and offered itself to their awareness in an almost completed state. In other cases, where
there is a concerted effort of all the psychic forces, there is nothing strange in the fact that conscious activity,
too, lends its aid. But it is the much-abused privilege of conscious activity to hide from us all other activities
wherever it participates.

It hardly seems worth while to take up the historical significance of dreams as a separate theme. Where, for
instance, a leader has been impelled by a dream to engage in a bold undertaking, the success of which has had the
effect of changing history, a new problem arises only so long as the dream is regarded as a mysterious power and
contrasted with other more familiar psychic forces. The problem disappears as soon as we regard the dream as a form of
expression for impulses to which a resistance was attached during the day, whilst at night they were able to draw
reinforcement from deep-lying sources of excitation. 1 But the great respect with which the ancient peoples
regarded dreams is based on a just piece of psychological divination. It is a homage paid to the unsubdued and
indestructible element in the human soul, to the demonic power which furnishes the dream-wish, and which we have found
again in our unconscious.

1 Cf. (chapter II.), the dream (Sa-Turos) of Alexander the Great at the siege of Tyre.

It is not without purpose that I use the expression in our unconscious, for what we so call does not coincide with
the unconscious of the philosophers, nor with the unconscious of Lipps. As they use the term, it merely means the
opposite of the conscious. That there exist not only conscious but also unconscious psychic processes is the opinion at
issue, which is so hotly contested and so energetically defended. Lipps enunciates the more comprehensive doctrine that
everything psychic exists as unconscious, but that some of it may exist also as conscious. But it is not to prove this
doctrine that we have adduced the phenomena of dreams and hysterical symptom-formation; the observation of normal life
alone suffices to establish its correctness beyond a doubt. The novel fact that we have learned from the analysis of
psycho-pathological formations, and indeed from the first member of the group, from dreams, is that the unconscious-
and hence all that is psychic — occurs as a function of two separate systems, and that as such it occurs even in normal
psychic life. There are consequently two kinds of unconscious, which have not as yet been distinguished by
psychologists. Both are unconscious in the psychological sense; but in our sense the first, which we call Ucs, is
likewise incapable of consciousness; whereas the second we call Pcs because its excitations, after the observance of
certain rules, are capable of reaching consciousness; perhaps not before they have again undergone censorship, but
nevertheless regardless of the Ucs system. The fact that in order to attain consciousness the excitations must pass
through an unalterable series, a succession of instances, as is betrayed by the changes produced in them by the
censorship, has enabled us to describe them by analogy in spatial terms. We described the relations of the two systems
to each other and to consciousness by saying that the system Pcs is like a screen between the system Ucs and
consciousness. The system Pcs not only bars access to consciousness, but also controls the access to voluntary
motility, and has control of the emission of a mobile cathectic energy, a portion of which is familiar to us as
attention. 1

1 Cf. here my remarks in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. xxvi,
in which the descriptive, dynamic and systematic meanings of the ambiguous word Unconscious are distinguished from one
another.

We must also steer clear of the distinction between the super — conscious and the subconscious, which has found such
favour in the more recent literature on the psychoneuroses, for just such a distinction seems to emphasize the
equivalence of what is psychic and what is conscious.

What role is now left, in our representation of things, to the phenomenon of consciousness, once so all-powerful and
over — shadowing all else? None other than that of a sense-organ for the perception of psychic qualities. According to
the fundamental idea of our schematic attempt we can regard conscious perception only as the function proper to a
special system for which the abbreviated designation Cs commends itself. This system we conceive to be similar in its
mechanical characteristics to the perception-system P, and hence excitable by qualities, and incapable of retaining the
trace of changes: i.e., devoid of memory. The psychic apparatus which, with the sense-organ of the P-systems, is turned
to the outer world, is itself the outer world for the sense-organ of Cs, whose teleological justification depends on
this relationship. We are here once more confronted with the principle of the succession of instances which seems to
dominate the structure of the apparatus. The material of excitation flows to the sense-organ Cs from two sides: first
from the P-system, whose excitation, qualitatively conditioned, probably undergoes a new elaboration until it attains
conscious perception; and, secondly, from the interior of the apparatus itself, whose quantitative processes are
perceived as a qualitative series of pleasures and pains once they have reached consciousness after undergoing certain
changes.

The philosophers, who became aware that accurate and highly complicated thought-structures are possible even without
the co — operation of consciousness, thus found it difficult to ascribe any function to consciousness; it appeared to
them a superfluous mirroring of the completed psychic process. The analogy of our Cs system with the perception-systems
relieves us of this embarrassment. We see that perception through our sense-organs results in directing an
attention-cathexis to the paths along which the incoming sensory excitation diffuses itself; the qualitative excitation
of the P-system serves the mobile quantity in the psychic apparatus as a regulator of its discharge. We may claim the
same function for the overlying sense-organ of the Cs system. By perceiving new qualities, it furnishes a new
contribution for the guidance and suitable distribution of the mobile cathexis-quantities. By means of perceptions of
pleasure and pain, it influences the course of the cathexes within the psychic apparatus, which otherwise operates
unconsciously and by the displacement of quantities. It is probable that the pain — principle first of all regulates
the displacements of cathexis automatically, but it is quite possible that consciousness contributes a second and more
subtle regulation of these qualities, which may even oppose the first, and perfect the functional capacity of the
apparatus, by placing it in a position contrary to its original design, subjecting even that which induces pain to
cathexis and to elaboration. We learn from neuro — psychology that an important part in the functional activity of the
apparatus is ascribed to these regulations by the qualitative excitations of the sense-organs. The automatic rule of
the primary pain-principle, together with the limitation of functional capacity bound up with it, is broken by the
sensory regulations, which are themselves again automatisms. We find that repression, which, though originally
expedient, nevertheless finally brings about a harmful lack of inhibition and of psychic control, overtakes memories
much more easily than it does perceptions, because in the former there is no additional cathexis from the excitation of
the psychic sense-organs. Whilst an idea which is to be warded off may fail to become conscious because it has
succumbed to repression, it may on other occasions come to be repressed simply because it has been withdrawn from
conscious perception on other grounds. These are clues which we make use of in therapy in order to undo accomplished
repressions.

The value of the hyper-cathexis which is produced by the regulating influence of the Cs sense-organs on the mobile
quantity is demonstrated in a teleological context by nothing more clearly than by the creation of a new series of
qualities, and consequently a new regulation, which constitutes the prerogative of man over animals. For the mental
processes are in themselves unqualitative except for the excitations of pleasure and pain which accompany them: which,
as we know, must be kept within limits as possible disturbers of thought. In order to endow them with quality, they are
associated in man with verbal memories, the qualitative residues of which suffice to draw upon them the attention of
consciousness, which in turn endows thought with a new mobile cathexis.

It is only on a dissection of hysterical mental processes that the manifold nature of the problems of consciousness
becomes apparent. One then receives the impression that the transition from the preconscious to the conscious cathexis
is associated with a censorship similar to that between Ucs and Pcs. This censorship, too, begins to act only when a
certain quantitative limit is reached, so that thought-formations which are not very intense escape it. All possible
cases of detention from consciousness and of penetration into consciousness under certain restrictions are included
within the range of psychoneurotic phenomena; all point to the intimate and twofold connection between the censorship
and consciousness. I shall conclude these psychological considerations with the record of two such occurrences.

On the occasion of a consultation a few years ago, the patient was an intelligent-looking girl with a simple,
unaffected manner. She was strangely attired; for whereas a woman's dress is usually carefully thought out to the last
pleat, one of her stockings was hanging down and two of the buttons of her blouse were undone. She complained of pains
in one of her legs, and exposed her calf without being asked to do so. Her chief complaint, however, was as follows:
She had a feeling in her body as though something were sticking into it which moved to and fro and shook her through
and through. This sometimes seemed to make her whole body stiff. On hearing this, my colleague in consultation looked
at me: the trouble was quite obvious to him. To both of us it seemed peculiar that this suggested nothing to the
patient's mother, though she herself must repeatedly have been in the situation described by her child. As for the
girl, she had no idea of the import of her words, or she would never have allowed them to pass her lips. Here the
censorship had been hoodwinked so successfully that under the mask of an innocent complaint a phantasy was admitted to
consciousness which otherwise would have remained in the preconscious.

Another example: I began the psycho-analytic treatment of a boy fourteen who was suffering from tic convulsif,
hysterical vomiting, headache, etc., by assuring him that after closing his eyes he would see pictures or that ideas
would occur to him, which he was to communicate to me. He replied by describing pictures. The last impression he had
received before coming to me was revived visually in his memory. He had been playing a game of checkers with his uncle,
and now he saw the checkerboard before him. He commented on various positions that were favourable or unfavourable, on
moves that were not safe to make. He then saw a dagger lying on the checker-board — an object belonging to his father,
but which his phantasy laid on the checker-board. Then a sickle was lying on the board; a scythe was added; and
finally, he saw the image of an old peasant mowing the grass in front of his father's house far away. A few days later
I discovered the meaning of this series of pictures. Disagreeable family circumstances had made the boy excited and
nervous. Here was a case of a harsh, irascible father, who had lived unhappily with the boy's mother, and whose
educational methods consisted of threats; he had divorced his gentle and delicate wife, and remarried; one day he
brought home a young woman as the boy's new mother. The illness of the fourteen-year-old boy developed a few days
later. It was the suppressed rage against his father that had combined these images into intelligible allusions. The
material was furnished by a mythological reminiscence. The sickle was that with which Zeus castrated his father; the
scythe and the image of the peasant represented Kronos, the violent old man who devours his children, and upon whom
Zeus wreaks his vengeance in so unfilial a manner. The father's marriage gave the boy an opportunity of returning the
reproaches and threats which the child had once heard his father utter because he played with his genitals (the
draught-board; the prohibited moves; the dagger with which one could kill). We have here long-impressed memories and
their unconscious derivatives which, under the guise of meaningless pictures, have slipped into consciousness by the
devious paths opened to them.

If I were asked what is the theoretical value of the study of dreams, I should reply that it lies in the additions
to psychological knowledge and the beginnings of an understanding of the neuroses which we thereby obtain. Who can
foresee the importance a thorough knowledge of the structure and functions of the psychic apparatus may attain, when
even our present state of knowledge permits of successful therapeutic intervention in the curable forms of
psychoneuroses? But, it may be asked, what of the practical value of this study in regard to a knowledge of the psyche
and discovery of the hidden peculiarities of individual character? Have not the unconscious impulses revealed by dreams
the value of real forces in the psychic life? Is the ethical significance of the suppressed wishes to be lightly
disregarded, since, just as they now create dreams, they may some day create other things?

I do not feel justified in answering these questions. I have not followed up this aspect of the problem of dreams.
In any case, however, I believe that the Roman Emperor was in the wrong in ordering one of his subjects to be executed
because the latter had dreamt that he had killed the Emperor. He should first of all have endeavoured to discover the
significance of the man's dreams; most probably it was not what it seemed to be. And even if a dream of a different
content had actually had this treasonable meaning, it would still have been well to recall the words of Plato — that
the virtuous man contents himself with dreaming of that which the wicked man does in actual life. I am therefore of the
opinion that dreams should be acquitted of evil. Whether any reality is to be attributed to the unconscious wishes, I
cannot say. Reality must, of course, be denied to all transitory and intermediate thoughts. If we had before us the
unconscious wishes, brought to their final and truest expression, we should still do well to remember that psychic
reality is a special form of existence which must not be confounded with material reality. It seems, therefore,
unnecessary that people should refuse to accept the responsibility for the immorality of their dreams. With an
appreciation of the mode of functioning of the psychic apparatus, and an insight into the relations between conscious
and unconscious, all that is ethically offensive in our dream-life and the life of phantasy for the most part
disappears.

"What a dream has told us of our relations to the present (reality) we will then seek also in our consciousness and
we must not be surprised if we discover that the monster we saw under the magnifying-glass of the analysis is a tiny
little infusorian" (H. Sachs).

For all practical purposes in judging human character, a man's actions and conscious expressions of thought are in
most cases sufficient. Actions, above all, deserve to be placed in the front rank; for many impulses which penetrate
into consciousness are neutralized by real forces in the psychic life before they find issue in action; indeed, the
reason why they frequently do not encounter any psychic obstacle on their path is because the unconscious is certain of
their meeting with resistances later. In any case, it is highly instructive to learn something of the intensively
tilled soil from which our virtues proudly emerge. For the complexity of human character, dynamically moved in all
directions, very rarely accommodates itself to the arbitrament of a simple alternative, as our antiquated moral
philosophy would have it.

And what of the value of dreams in regard to our knowledge of the future? That, of course, is quite out of the
question. One would like to substitute the words: in regard to our knowledge of the past. For in every sense a dream
has its origin in the past. The ancient belief that dreams reveal the future is not indeed entirely devoid of the
truth. By representing a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, which the
dreamer accepts as his present, has been shaped in the likeness of the past by the indestructible wish.